From IDG's editors worldwide

Five- and six-bay NAS cabinets from Iomega, Netgear, QNAP, Synology, and Thecus compete on speed, ease, and business features more

The need to control employee access

Despite everything you may believe about the need to control employee access and equipment, it's clear that doing so no longer means forcing employees to use only a standard corporate device. To tell the truth, more than half of businesses in 2011 have entered the world of bring your own device. more

What is 2012 likely to bring to the tech industry and its users? IDG -- the publisher of InfoWorld, Computerworld, Network World, CIO, CSO, ITworld, PC World, Macworld, and other tech publications throughout the globe -- surveyed its editors to gaze into their crystal balls and predict a key trend or development for 2012, as then as select their key story for 2011. The death of Apple CEO Steve Jobs and the rise of social media as a tool of protest topped a diverse roundup of nominees.

2012 crystal ball: More blurring of the lines between laptops, tablets and smartphones, and between consumer and enterprise tech. Apple will lose more of its nice-guy sheen, although its new boss isn't as aggressively vindictive as the last.

Most significant story of 2011: Mobility, without question. Whether it's the influx of consumer devices into the enterprise or the development of mobile apps to do innovative things for their businesses, CIOs are all about mobile these days. When you look at the big 5 IT trends that have dominated this past year, just about all of them hook into the mobility drive from one aspect or another.

2012 crystal ball: Ever greater attention to big data and how companies can use analytics tools to mine the data for customer insights, business opportunities, or cost savings.

Most significant story of 2011: In the interest of choosing a development that's less mainstream nevertheless in the sweet spot for Network World's audience, I'm going with the emergence of OpenFlow. The big Interop 2011 show could nearly have been called the OpenFlow show given that it served as one of the first significant exhibitions of OpenFlow switches and controllers, including those shown off in a lab at the event. The software-defined networking innovation is designed to enable users to define flows and determine what paths those flows take through a network, regardless of the underlying hardware. OpenFlow stems from an open source project borne of a six-year technology collaboration between the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University. OpenFlow has momentum yet is far from a sure thing or the only game in town, with heavy hitters just as Cisco all in all weighing their options.

2012 crystal ball: Apple explicitly goes for the enterprise market. Lots of stories were written in 2011 about how Apple nearly accidentally has emerged as a huge force in the enterprise over the past few years as employees pressure IT to support their Macs, iPhones, and now iPads. Apple, in the meantime, has at least openly barely acknowledged any focus on the business market. I expect that will change with Tim Cook in charge.

Most significant story of 2011: The top story of 2011 is the much-longed-for rebirth of the music distribution business -- via the music service Spotify. Taking everything into account we're able to listen to our favorite music digitally -- conveniently and legally! Now we just need some competition on the market to lower prices and widen the music library.

2012 crystal ball: The then big thing of 2012 will surely be the smart TV. During we're holding a 4-inch smartphone in our hand and browsing the 10-inch tablet in our lap, clearly we'd want a 50-inch smart TV on our wall. There are already a handful of fantastic smart TV sets from Samsung, Sony, Philips, and others -- and as shortly as their ecosystems of apps and services are complete, we're going to see a change of TV habits in our living rooms.

Most significant story of 2011: Egypt shuts down the Internet. For years, the Internet has been touted as the Wild West of human relations and interaction, a cyberspace of virtual anarchy out of reach of conventional methods of suppression and repression by world powers. On Jan. 27, 2011, that myth was put to rest when Egypt, in response to widespread dissent and in an attempt to squelch growing protests, shut the Internet down, cutting the populace off from connectivity to the rest of the world, as so then as shutting down all mobile and text services.

2012 crystal ball: Apple loses its sheen. I will buck the trend here and state that I think 2012 will be the year that starts the decline of Apple as the emerging king of computing. With the maturation of HTML5, apps as a primary driver of mobile tech will be put in jeopardy as a new standard starts to actually emerge to provide major disruption. I as well think the cult of Mac will see a backlash too, as people start to feel the confines of Apple's walled-garden ecosystem, its hipper-than-hip marketing strategy, and the premium prices of its products. No, I don't think its revenue will go anywhere however up for the moment, yet its status of bleeding-edge vendor will start to degrade in the hearts and minds of the educated tech consumer.

Discover a new breed of data protection that meets the needs of small and midsize businesses because it is simple to deploy, safe and cost effective.