Quest Software shares ten predictions for technology trends and practices in 2012

Quest Software Inc. shares ten predictions for innovation trends and practices in 2012 based on its latest The Experts Conference Survey.

Ian Hodge, managing director - Australia and New Zealand, Quest Software, said, "The IT community is responding to explosive demand for mobility, collaboration and social networking technologies. Together, virtualisation and cloud computing are reshaping how and where applications and computing power are managed and delivered. The implications on communications, security, provisioning, and systems management are enormous.

1. SaaS growth will help drive wider adoption of cloud services. Though SaaS offerings cover the spectrum of business and technical applications, shared business services just as messaging, customer relationship management and human resources are the most popular solutions.

5. Cloud workloads will remain on the whole isolated for the foreseeable future. During the growth of private and public cloud usage ensures that more organisations will be supporting hybrid cloud environments, concerns about security, control and research maturity lead most organisations to isolate internal and external workloads. As a result, cloud-bursting, the practice of moving excess workload to an external cloud on an on-demand basis when processing demands exceed internal data centre resources has but to gain any traction within IT organisations.

6. Google and Microsoft will strongly challenge Apple's lead in the IT mobile market. Adoption of new mobile technologies is proceeding at an unprecedented rate. The new technologies are evolving rapidly and, unlike the desktop market, the battle to become the standard is far from over. When deciding which platforms to support, IT administrators face the challenge of balancing current market share and capabilities against long-term potential. Weaknesses will be fixed over time, and administrators will have to manage the devices that will be chosen by the majority of their end users. During Apple iOS is currently in the IT leadership position, Google Android's high ranking is likely a reflection of where the market will head as its sales increase and capabilities improve. In the same fashion, Microsoft remains a strong contender with Windows 7.

The rapid explosion of popularity in the mobile

Given the rapid explosion of popularity in the mobile and apps worlds, the stakes in this market are especially high. Though Research in Motion's Blackberry had a great run from its first-to-market advantage in the smart phone market, that run is now waning. Microsoft is certainly feeling the pressure to gain a dominant position, since mobile devices and tablets pose a very real threat to the now-legacy PC era upon which Windows was built. Apple's research and Google's mass appeal and open Android architecture only serve to raise the stakes. New players just as Chinese Huawei are standing in the wings, more than happy to ride the mobile wave into the enterprise, and beyond.

7. Cloud applications, compliance and mobile devices will drive a reshaping of corporate identity & access management strategies. New compliance mandates, the growing use of cloud-based applications, and the proliferation of smart phones and tablets are causing IT organisations to rethink their identity management and user provisioning strategies to control support costs and better manage security. Quest Software finds that corporate managers want greater transparency in the IAM activities that support compliance-mandated governance processes. Meeting these concerns will result in many changes in how enterprise IT organisations operate and automate on-premises identity systems. As organisations seek better decisions about how best to control access, Quest Software predicts growing adoption of content classification systems to help identify sensitive data.

9. Office 365 will see slow adoption, except among small businesses. Cloud-based email solutions offer organisations an increasingly attractive alternative for outsourcing their corporate email systems, including much of their operational overhead. Though on-premise systems, notably Microsoft Exchange, for all that dominate, cloud-based email solutions are catching on with early adopters. Vendors are using Office 365 at double the rate of IT organisations - this is as expected since vendors need to understand the platform to prepare their own solutions and encourage clients to consider and adopt the new Microsoft platform.

The small business community

Quest Software predicts that Microsoft will find traction for Office 365 in the small business community, and that this is where most of Microsoft's growth will come from. Security and privacy concerns will continue to yield slow growth in the medium and large enterprise arenas. Quest Software expects Google to continue to struggle in demonstrating its ability to understand the enterprise. The weak performance of Google, and the less than- stellar success of Microsoft, serve to prop the door wide open for new challengers just as VMware's Zimbra to enter the race.

The cloud email market is all in all very much in its infancy and has much maturing to do. Widely regarded as one of the fastest growing Microsoft solutions in history, SharePoint has enjoyed tremendous adoption and deployment rates over the years. During Quest Software predicts that the pace of the growth will slow over time, SharePoint will continue to be on a high growth trajectory overall. This will, for most companies, prompt active investigation into how best to leverage SharePoint for business-critical activities and specific applications and let SharePoint continue to grow its collaboration market share.

10. Employees will face increased monitoring of their social networking activities. Social networking provides but another challenge to corporate and government administrators seeking to monitor and control the flow of information that can impact their organisations. Employee use of social networking applications just as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn blurs the boundaries between personal and business environments, and has implications for corporate branding image, regulatory compliance, personnel policies, information security and work productivity. Social networking policies are becoming a greater topic of interest as social media gains in popularity.

The breadth

Most organisations are running blind without any visibility into the breadth and depth of social networking use, and abuse, within their employee base. Over time, reporting solutions will be implemented and more granular controls will emerge. Furthermore, niche vendors who provide granular levels of control for companies subject to compliance regimes as well are emerging, and that's a positive development for the market. Many organisations will not care about social networking until a PR or legal crisis tied to social networking innovation hits and shines the spotlight on the problem.

Hodge said, "Quest Software is constantly working to understand the issues and needs of the IAM, Exchange, SharePoint, virtualisation and cloud communities through interaction with its clients, review of the latest information from research forums, and thoughtful analysis by its team of research experts. This helps Quest Software build better products and provide organisations with knowledge and best practices to improve their productivity and efficiency."