As you can probably imagine, the News Room inbox here at TechCentral Towers is a gold mine of information, facts and insights on the technology industry, both domestic and global.
However, as with all information sources, it can sometimes feel like drinking from the fire hose, as the sheer deluge, in terms of both volume and velocity, can be overwhelming.
But these days, search tools are getting better at almost the same rate that missives land in the News Room pile, and so, in a fairly unscientific manner, I conducted a small exercise to see what the trending topics were since the first of January this year.
Looking for keyword incidence only, I took a set of terms that were pretty common across a number of major technology news sites, including our own.
“Unsurprisingly, malware (88) and breach (100) figured well, though ransomware at 30 belies its place in the technology psyche”
I began by simply doing a search for each, on the outlined time criterion, and noting each result.
Firstly, cloud computing brought back 119 instances.
This might sound low, as on an average day, we might expect one hundred odd emails before morning coffee. But on inspection, what I found was that the term cloud computing itself is now being used less and less in referencing the very concept it denotes as other usages, being either more specific or general, reflect the growing trend towards simply referring to ‘cloud’ or ‘computing’, assuming the association.
Converged infrastructure came in at 82 mentions, with hyperconverged on just 7. This may well be one of those scissor graph instances where we witness one technology being supplanted by another, as recent analyst reports have signalled a decline in converged infrastructure sales, while hyperconverged infrastructure has come into double-digit growth.
Next was good old virtualisation, or virtualization, as they say elsewhere. There was a still a solid 81. Again this may sound low, but when you think of the number of subsets within this, such as containers or server consolidation etc., the term itself is in use less and less to denote the technology as a whole.
Unsurprisingly, malware (88) and breach (100) figured well, though ransomware at 30 belies its place in the technology psyche, but for comparison, distributed denial of service (DDoS) was in or around the same at 33.
What was not surprising, and supporting some of the other results, was that General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came in at 70 mentions, but when looked at in a wider context to include regulation (158) in general and data protection (161) in particular, the focus for the year becomes clear.
GDPR and regulatory compliance is the hottest topic for information technology and security professionals for foreseeable future, or May of next year, whichever way you want to put it.
This entirely unscientific, but at the same time fairly illuminating, exercise goes to show that when the industry gets focused on a topic, it can result in a deluge. But it could also be argued that it reflects a specific need for information, tools and guidance on this pressing issue.
As we have shown via our recent series of features on GDPR, the time to act is now, as anyone calling on external resources will likely find them in high demand, with the usual effect of supply and demand expected.
Unlike some emerging technology that is sweeping the industry, failure to act on GDPR will not be without consequences. While any version 1.0 technology can often be overlooked for a more stable second round, regulatory compliance cannot be waited out for a more amenable second offering.
Act now, act swiftly and don’t find yourself on a waiting list if you determine that your organisation needs help.
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