Big tech trends may not all be tech
Content is still king, but IoT might take hold at last, writes Leslie Faughnan
At this time of the year, it is traditional to look ahead in ICT, have fun guessing what will make it big and sometimes even looking back ruefully at previous years’ forecasts. What usually happens is that the leading tech advances and trends picked by the pundits, ours as well as more popular media, are ahead of the actual curve — if indeed they perform significantly at all. By the time adoption is firm they are already out of date in news terms.
Of course, we are all curious about the new and sexy and gadgetry of all kinds. Serious business tech is often just new or newer — think cloud computing, as one good example which never lent itself to colour photos. It even gets associated more often than not with mobile devices, probably because they can be illustrated. Something similar can be said about drones, robots, wearables, curved screens and virtual or augmented reality. They can all offer something to business — and be the basis of businesses — but the hype is consumer based. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a great vision but essentially undramatic; some of the things are sexy but most are dull little boxes of electronics.
This year, let us be more serious. So many organisations are now almost fully digital that non-tech factors are often more significant and the technology follows the real world and its processes and changing needs. There is a looming issue that is in our view likely to be a major factor in 2017 and beyond: geography. There is a still-growing rift between the EU and the USA on data privacy and its control. Despite the Privacy Shield, still much more a concept than a proven reality, the philosophies, policies and laws are very different. In the Trump era, the best bet is that the divide is going to grow.
Then we have Brexit. Apart from all its other ramifications, the British have just introduced what is arguably the most potentially intrusive surveillance regime in a modern democracy. The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 forces communications services (phone and web companies) to hold users’ activity records for a year and gives the police, security services and official agencies unprecedented access to the data. Official hacking becomes legal.
“There is a still-growing rift between the EU and the USA on data privacy and its control. Despite the Privacy Shield, still much more a concept than a proven reality, the philosophies, policies and laws are very different. In the Trump era, the best bet is that the divide is going to grow”
Now to be fair, most of us believe that US and UK agencies have been doing this covertly for years as Snowden’s revelations proved. But now it is massive and legal. Irish law is not much better, in that it requires user call and related data to be held for two years. But in general, we observe shared EU standards on data privacy and so far as we know do not have intelligence agencies interested in economic, military and industrial espionage.
So, if you are an Irish private citizen you may be averse to using any service that is UK-based for anything other than essential online bargain hunting. If you are a director of an Irish company trading internationally, or an FDI corporation of any HQ nationality, would you really be 100% content to store your EMEA data in a UK data centre? Even a US multinational would be wary, e.g. Microsoft fighting data handover from federal security agencies in the US courts. Certainly, any company doing sensitive business with non-EU countries would avoid US or UK data centres. Whether in technology or financial services, trading with Russia or China or Singapore, the geographical footprint of your data will become a key decision vector.
But geography will not be the complete solution. Cybersecurity will still reign supreme and 2017 may well become The Year of Encryption. We may well also see the beginnings of a return to fixed connectivity for enhanced security, point-to-point or WAN or Mesh.
All of this security effort is to protect Data: we acknowledged its importance all along as ICT matured, but data has really come back into focus. It is what we actually use tech for. Today the power of data analytics, and its importance to every kind of organisation, is growing exponentially. You could go further and say that data analytics itself is now what is powering financial and other trading, online betting and gaming, smart retailing, risk management, automation in its millions of potential manifestations — and security.
Content is king, content is information, content always has value — even if only to illustrate current social media idiocies for future historians. Content can also be natively digital, like financial transactions and M2M communications. The point is that the ways in which we transmit or store or process that digital content, data as we can also call it, change constantly. The new understanding is that this tech change process is immaterial. It is the content that counts. ICT exists to serve it — or create it. That is far more than a trend: it is a movement, a subtle but seismic shift in our philosophy of IT.
Analytics complements data. We have been using multiple forms of report, especially in accounting, since the dawn of commerce and literacy. Analysis raises reporting to a richer level and smart modern algorithms enrich the information even further. Predictive analytics in many environments are increasingly accurate. Online retailing and betting, insurance and other subscription renewals, machine maintenance and end-of-life timing are some of the many successful applications. Alas, these are the predictable things, based on past history and of no use in winning lotteries. But real-time analytics are the software basis for the essential ‘decision making’ capabilities of autonomous machines of all kinds, from robots to vehicles to adaptive 3D printers. In the new Age of Analytics, 2017 will be a formative year.
Internet of Things — possibly the simplest and most self-explanatory piece of jargon the IT sector has come up with, although alas IoT is not a pronounceable acronym. Will 2017 be The Year of IoT? Not particularly, although its progress is by now well established, inevitable and will rapidly permeate our lives in the ways that the Internet/Web and mobile capabilities already do. In many ways, the IoT is directly comparable to digital mobility — it just adds a whole new category of devices that will be joined up and given bidirectional remote access.
But the range of ‘Things’ is potentially vast, from the dumb or inert to the very smart and even autonomous. Mobile carriers and ISPs have been swamped by video and high-resolution imagery. The IoT (in theory at least) will be based on low data rate requirements and Europe is in the lead with entire network capability i.e. the Netherlands, being followed closely by Denmark, France, Germany and others. Ireland is almost completely covered by VT Networks, exclusive operator of the Sigfox low-power networking technology specially developed for the IoT.
So 2017 may not be the Year of IoT but it will certainly be remembered as the one of the (future historians will debate) years in which the Age of the IoT began.
Leslie Faughnan, contributing editor
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