Significant 2012 IT trends

“The coming 12 months stand to be a defining period for Significant 2012 IT trends in any enterprise,” said Simon Robinson, Research Director, 451 Research. “Economic concerns will weigh heavily on the minds of IT decision-makers this year, and will increasingly drive customers toward thinking about cloud-based approaches. Indeed, 2012 could be when the cloud comes of age, and for the first time will start to nip away at traditional IT deployment models in enterprise environments.”

451 Research, published an all-encompassing document highlighting the most disruptive and significant trends that the analyst firm expects to dominate and drive the enterprise IT industry agenda over the approaching year.

Key findings of the document include Significant 2012 IT trends:

Virtualization becomes mission-critical – Virtualization is evolving from a cost-effective extension to development & test-lab resources in to a platform for mission-critical applications in production.

Enterprise cloud adoption moves from the playground to production – In 2012, cloud services will compete more aggressively with IT departments. There is an ideal storm of economic, technological & operational conditions in play that make cloud adoption inevitable.

Cloud security questions linger – “Cloud security” is still predicated on a one-enterprise view (whether it be the view from the customer side or the provider side), & although there’s tools being adapted for the virtualized surroundings, vendors are only slowly working out how to scale in a multi-tenant fashion that takes in to consideration the fact that an enterprise will seldom use cloud.

Cloud drives agenda & consolidation in hosting – They expect to see continued consolidation in hosting in the work of 2012, in Europe. Smaller players will be swallowed up by larger peers, or by telcos & SIs looking to build up their portfolios.

Mobile apps to drive the enterprise in 2012 – IT’s focus on mobility for voice & messaging is coming to an finish. More organizations will build or buy mobile apps, generating the necessity for mobile security & mobile application lifecycle management across the whole tool & platform landscape.

Modularity drives the 2012 datacenter agenda – They expect the great majority of new datacenters to be highly modular in design, tightly integrated and pre-configured before actual construction or delivery. This will disrupt datacenter supply chains as suppliers and service companies seek new partnerships and routes to market.

Innovation returns to the systems world – Pre-integrated converged infrastructure, specialized application appliances and high-density blades for server farms using low-power processors will all play an increasing role, for midsized organizations as they look to squeeze more value from virtualization as this are some significant 2012 IT trends

Storage spotlight focuses on efficiency – Continued information growth and a persistent tight spending surroundings will place more emphasis on efficiency than ever before, which will open opportunities for innovative approaches. The emergence of solid-state technologies will stay the Significant 2012 IT trends.

Shift to software-defined networking accelerates – Software-defined networking will have a dramatic impact on the way in which datacenter and service-provider networks are built. There won’t be any sizable production networks jogging OpenFlow in 2012, but its implications are causing ripples in the strategies of traditional networking vendors, swelling the ranks of new networking startups and making a tide of new approaches to networking hardware.

Information, information in every single place – cloud to IT’s rescue? – In 2012 the focus will be on making information more obtainable by mobile and cloud strategies, without sacrificing governance goals. IT will must meet the needs of business users with mobile devices (and Apple iPads ) or take the risk that those users will go on their own to consumer services in lieu.

Questioning the worth of “big data” – Sizable information will continue to be a hot topic, but the focus will shift from volume, variety and velocity to the all-important endgame of deriving value from information – what they term “Total Information.”

(Some) clarity emerges in Eco-IT – Energy management will continue to gain ground as the point of interest of eco-efficient IT, and will slowly but surely move up the priority lists of C-suite executives and Significant 2012 IT trends.