Technology disruption and changing user behaviors result in a continually evolving IT landscape. On the brink of a new decade, businesses and organizations are looking for solutions to emerging challenges, as well as for strategies that will enable them to capitalize on innovations.
John Aisien, CEO, and Nikfar Khaleeli, VP of Products at Blue Cedar, share their insights on changing attitudes toward technology and how businesses — and ISVs and software developers — can overcome challenges and find opportunities.
Here are four IT trends and how they could play out in 2020:
1The BYOD and CYOD trends create a need for application-specific security.
In light of privacy concerns, new regulations, and continual security threats that raise awareness of insufficient device security, Aisien looks for employees of enterprises with BYOD (bring your own device) or CYOD (choose your own device) policies to push back.
Deloitte reports that 67 percent of employees use a personal device at work and are, to varying degrees, required to relinquish control over their mobile devices and the private data stored on them.
“As the stakes for privacy management become higher and higher from endless breaches — 54 percent higher in 2019 alone — and increased regulations, like GDPR and CCPA, we’ll see enterprises deploy more effective means of privacy control for its employee’s personal devices, like application-specific security, as opposed to only device-level.”
Aisien adds, “This will mitigate privacy invasion for employees and enable tighter vulnerability controls for the enterprise, all while still providing necessary corporate data and accessibility to the end user via the mobile device of their choice.”
2The low-code trend will give way to no-code solutions.
Khaleeli points out, “Low-code solutions will become less attractive as full no-code solutions continue to surface and enable developers to focus less on rote, repeatable problems.” For example, Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors will enable customers to make extensions on their platforms or automated security integration, and more, on sophisticated projects. “As no-code solutions empower more citizen developers to automate some of those simpler problems, we will see a new generation of software innovation emerge as high-value developers narrow in on the more complex issues that burden the broader technology ecosystem,” Khaleeli says.
35G will bring about a new era of true edge compute capabilities.
Long-anticipated, 5G implementation will ramp up in 2020, and about 1.1 billion devices will be connected by 2025.
“This rise and widespread deployment of 5G will facilitate an era of true edge compute power,” says Aisien. “Enterprises will leverage 5G’s speed and agility and the mobile nature of edge devices to store and access sensitive corporate data from any location.”
Aisien adds that 5G will also create “an integral need for better, more efficient edge device security that can withstand the next generation of computational power and is capable of managing and protecting mobile devices at the edge.”
4DevSecOps will shift left.
“A reported 53 percent of online users are currently more concerned about their online privacy compared to a year ago,” says Khaleeli. “With heightened privacy concerns, there will be an increased focus on addressing both corporate security and user privacy concerns much earlier in the development cycle.”
He says development teams will investigate their options for solutions that provide granular controls, such as app-level security. In parallel, teams will also investigate how to automate security integration into the development lifecycle.
“Cybersecurity programming skills are in short supply, and there is no cost-effective way for teams to address growing demands through solely manual coding. Having security automatically integrated addresses the mundane nature of certain repeatable processes, freeing up developer time. More importantly, automation that brings in security tech early in the lifecycle allows the entire solution to be tested at once, again saving dev cycles. If security isn’t shifted left — brought into the dev cycle early — testing will have to be repeated once security is added in.”
