If you know where to look there is an amazing amount free training or talks online. I recently attended a free Webinar from Gartner called “Ten Trends and Technologies to Impact IT Over the Next Five Years” by Raymond Paquet.

I found it interesting, mainly because it matches what I have seen, but also because it is a mix of obvious and mind opening. Like most of you I probably do not actively “consider” what happens around me all the time. There are periods I try to sit back and see what the things I do actually mean and analyze why things happen the way they do, but most of the time I just react. A soft talk like this should hopefully make you sit back and understand that we are in a period of time when we are experiencing a lot of changes. Technology is present in every aspect of your life, in ways that we did never expect. Everything we do we voluntarily put online, we are weighed, measured, tracked and documented in every way both privately and professionally.

So take your time and consider the ten trends from Gartner (and with my short comments):

1. Software-defined X – Kind of a catch-all point. Everything will be software configured and software defined. He mainly talks about computer systems, but I would expect this to happen in every level of our society.
2. IT Service Continuity – “Everything” has to be available easily and quickly all the time, and IT providers can not lose data.
3. Integrated Systems – Smaller and smaller applications/services that connect to replace large system applications. In other words: Security and complexity arise!
4. Hyper connectivity  – Everything is connected all the time, and the network capacity will increase exponentially.
5. Bimodal IT – We have two requirements that do not match, control and structured maintenance and fast and agile development. To fix it: Split your IT departments in two.
6. The Internet of Things – This has several consequences among else: how to maintain the networks that enables this, preferably securely and user-friendly!
7. Open Source Hardware – He claims that hardware will be even cheaper where you shop the different parts and put them together by yourself according to open source design and drawings.
8. Shrinking Data Centers – Using clouds and other providers the companies will decrease their own data centers. Also a security issue by the way, but so is storing anything.
9. Continuous Demand – Costs will raise, storage capacity will increase by about 50% a year! Everyone wants everything at once.
10. Organizational Entrenchment and Disruption factors – Among else: Cloud, growth in IT complexity, faster change cycles, faster development time, end-user driven IT and reduced budgets. See the presentation for details.

When you see this list and really consider it, you understand that my job, and maybe yours(?), as an IT professional will not get any easier the next few years.

All of our data, both privately and professionally, will be even more exposed and in serious risk for being stolen and used by nefarious actors.

Even more information will be gathered every second of your life and every phase of your day.

How do we handle this? Are we able to?