The adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) platforms will dominate enterprise IT strategies in 2018, according to Hitachi Vantara.
Information technology will adopt IoT platforms to facilitate the application of IoT solutions, and must work closely with the operational side of businesses to focus on specific needs and define the scope of IoT projects, according to a company survey of 2018 IT trends.
"Building IoT solutions that provide real value can be difficult without a deep understanding of the business to properly simulate and digitalise operational entities and processes," said Hubert Yoshida, chief technology officer of Hitachi Vantara, a subsidiary of Hitachi.
Russell Skingsley, chief technology officer at Hitachi Vantara's Asia-Pacific division, said enterprises should find IoT platforms that offer open, flexible architecture, simplifying integration with complimentary technologies. The chosen platform should further provide an extensible "foundry" on which to build a variety of industry applications companies need to design, create, test and deploy quickly, with minimal hassle, he said.
For enterprises that started their digital transformation this year, the first problem they ran into was the ability to access their data. Data is often locked in isolated islands that make it costly to extract and use. These islands were not built to be shared, and many contain data that is duplicated, obsolete or no longer used because of changes in business processes or ownership.
"Data scientists tell us that 80% of the work involved in gaining analytical insight from data is the tedious work of acquiring and preparing it. The concept of a data lake is alluring, but you can't just pour your data into one system, unless it has been properly cleansed, formatted and indexed or tagged with metadata so that the data lake is content-aware. Otherwise you end up with a data swamp," said Mr Skingsley.
While object storage can take in massive amounts of unstructured data and provide metadata management and search capabilities, the capacity to be context-aware is missing. Object storage now has the capability to be "smart" with software that can search for and read content in multiple structured and unstructured data silos and analyse it for cleansing, formatting and indexing.
Hitachi Vantara said this year would witness a growth in analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) across the board as companies see real returns on their investments. According to IDC, revenue growth from information-based products will double the rest of the product and services portfolios for a third of Fortune 500 companies by the end of 2017.
"AI became mainstream with consumer products like Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri," said Mr Skingsley.
Video content analytics will be a "third eye" for greater insight, productivity and efficiency in a number of domains beyond public safety. Algorithms that automatically detect and determine temporal, spatial and relational events combined with other IoT information such as mobile phone GPS and social media feeds can be applied to a wide range of businesses like retail, healthcare, automotive, manufacturing, education and entertainment.
Mr Yoshida said video can provide unique functions, like ego motion -- 3D motion used in autonomous robot navigation -- behaviour analysis and other forms of situational awareness.
"Retailers are using video to analyse customer navigation patterns and dwell time to position products and sales assistance to maximise sales. Video analytics relies on good video input so it requires video enhancement technologies like de-noising, image stabilisation, masking and super resolution. Video analytics may be the sleeper in terms of analytics for ease of use, ROI (return on investment) and generating actionable analytics," said Mr Yoshida.
IT organisations have a legacy of siloed operations with server, network, storage, database, virtualisation and now cloud administrators passing change notices back and forth to deliver a business outcome. In fact, many would argue that IT was more focused on IT outcomes than business outcomes.
"Even when data centres use technology to create shared data repositories to break down the data silos, the different functions were still focused on their own objectives and not on the overall business objectives. Now with cross-functional teams using iterative agile sprints of two to four weeks, IT can focus on relevant business outcomes and deliver it more efficiently," said Mr Skingsley.
Visitors pose with Sophia, a robot integrating the latest technologies and artificial intelligence developed by Hanson Robotics at the 'AI for Good' global summit at the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva in June.
Mr Yoshida said 2018 will see more enterprises move to agile and DevOps in software development, with agile methodologies being used across the enterprise.
Next year will bring a wave of new challenges in data governance that will require organisations to implement new frameworks. The biggest challenge will come from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will give EU residents more control over their personal data. This regulation will drive up costs and increase the risks involved in collecting and storing personal data. Violators of the GDPR could face fines totalling up to US$21.8 million, or 4% of the EU's total annual worldwide turnover for the preceding financial year.
"Previous data governance was based on the processing of data and metadata. New data governance must now consider data context. If a user invokes their right to be forgotten, a company must be able to locate that individual's data, eradicate it and provide proof that this has been done. GDPR's mandatory breach notification of within 72 hours also means organisations face a very short window to respond. The ability to do this is impossible if the data is scattered in different application silos and cannot cover data stored on mobile devices or in the cloud. In 2018, data governance frameworks will need to be updated to include content intelligence tools," said Mr Skingsley.
Container-based virtualisation is the latest such technology that will gain wider acceptance in 2018, said Hitachi Vantara. Considered a new generation of virtual machines, containers consist only of the application and all the dependencies that the application needs.
"Containers are lightweight, in that they do not need a dedicated operating system for each one, which helps to reduce costs," said Mr Yoshida. "Their open configuration also means that they can run on numerous platforms and allow applications to run in isolation from one another, resulting in greater security. Monolithic applications can be written as micro services and run in containers for greater agility, scale and reliability. Enterprises are migrating and developing new applications with containers in order to be competitive in today's market, which is defined by agility and efficiency."
Meanwhile, blockchain will hit the front pages of major newspapers next year for two reasons, he said.
First is the use of cryptocurrencies, which have seen growing acceptance this year as a stable currency in countries that were plagued by hyperinflation. Japan and Singapore are also indicating that they will create flat-denominated cryptocurrencies in 2018 that will be run by banks and managed by regulators. Consumers will use this for P2P payments, e-commerce and fund transfers. This will lead many banks to turn to blockchain to help them build the capacity needed to manage accounts in cryptocurrencies.
Second is the growing use of blockchain in the financial sector for routine processes like internal regulatory functions, customer documentation and regulatory filings. Interbank fund transfers via blockchain ledgers are also expected to expand in 2018, and other sectors will begin to see prototypes with smart contracts and identity services for healthcare, governments, food safety and counterfeit goods.
The growing number of passwords required by today's consumers will also support the shift toward biometric authentication in 2018.
"In reality, most of us use the same password for the accounts that we don't think are very important. Unfortunately, hackers also know this, so once they discover a password, they will use it to successfully hack other accounts. Businesses are coming to the realisation that proxies that represent our identity -- like passwords, ATM cards, and pin numbers -- even with two-factor authentication, are hackable," said Mr Skingsley.
"Smartphone vendors and financial companies are moving to solve this problem by using biometrics that represent the real user. But choosing the right biometric is important. If a biometric like a fingerprint is hacked, there is no way to reset it in the same way you would a pin number or password. Since we leave our fingerprint on everything we touch, it is conceivable that someone could lift our prints and reuse them. Hitachi recommends the use of finger veins, which can only be seen when infrared light is passed through a live finger to capture the vein pattern and is the most resistant to forgery," he said.
In 2018, Mr Yoshida said Hitachi will witness a shift in value creation, away from producer-centric, solution-value creation to a co-creation paradigm.
"Producers and consumers can no longer survive in the digital world with the traditional approach to value creation. In the digital world, producers cannot take years to develop a solution and consumers cannot plan their business on multi-year roadmaps that may not deliver what they need. If producers are to innovate, consumers must be active participants in the value-creation process as co-creators," he said.
Commerce Bot, a robot that provides customer service with artificial intelligence technology and voice recognition is seen at SK telecom's stand at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, February 28, 2017. REUTERS/Paul Hanna