Trends Identified
Seamless Collaboration
It is time for the enterprise to reimagine the way its employees work. The rise in social networking has breathed new life into collaboration. Users’ new social behavior and growing expectation that every app will be “social” are pushing companies to create new user experiences. However, to increase productivity, enterprises must move beyond standalone social and collaboration channels; they must begin to directly embed those channels into their core business processes. The new approach: build social, collaborative applications throughout the enterprise.
2013
Accenture Technology Vision 2013
Accenture
Software-Defined Networking
With virtualization investments already paying off in servers and starting to pay off in storage, businesses must turn their attention to virtualizing the network in order to extend the life of their infrastructure and reap the full value of their virtualization investments. Like other virtualization technologies, softwaredefined networking (SDN) has the ability to radically change the flexibility with which businesses and IT operate. You may think of networking as a low-level technology, but this aspect of it has the ability to transform enterprises. With SDN, businesses can finally realize the vision of a dynamic enterprise.
2013
Accenture Technology Vision 2013
Accenture
Active Defense
Despite an increasing focus on securing the digital business, IT departments struggle to keep pace with recent advances in security technology. Enterprises know that endpoint security is not enough, but the move to active defense—risk-based approaches to security management, analytics-driven event detection, and reflex-like incident response—isn’t yet happening on a broad scale. Although these technologies are maturing rapidly and communities are forming to expose risks, the biggest barrier is slow adoption of solutions that already exist. IT’s core challenge: get current with best practices in security while getting smarter about the new active-defense possibilities and getting real about the journey ahead.
2013
Accenture Technology Vision 2013
Accenture
Beyond the Cloud
No vision would be complete without commenting on the cloud. However, cloud computing is no longer an emerging trend. The on-demand, elastic technology needs to be considered in all decisions made today; the key question is not “should we use cloud?” but “how can we use cloud?” More than that: cloud isn’t a single concept. Its individual elements—from IaaS to SaaS to PaaS, from public to private—are as distinct and different from one another as the opportunities for enterprises to use them. So the real “trend” is a shift in focus to the next phase: putting cloud to work and crafting an overarching approach that weaves cloud capabilities into the fabric of the enterprise—with business value uppermost in mind.
2013
Accenture Technology Vision 2013
Accenture
Context-based services
Forget about the much-discussed Internet of Things. The really interesting news is that data from a host of new sources, combined with technologies that rapidly aggregate and analyze the data, will deliver fresh insights that can give users much more immersive and valuable experiences online—and in the real world.
2012
Accenture Technology Vision 2012
Accenture
Converging data architectures
Old approaches to data survive because structured forms of data make IT leaders feel they’re in control. But new approaches to managing unstructured data provide a whole new notion of control—the ability to turn data into new streams of value. Successfully rebalancing the data architecture portfolio and blending the structured with the unstructured are key to unlocking that value.
2012
Accenture Technology Vision 2012
Accenture
Industrialized data services
Now that data is being decoupled, enterprises are using it in many different ways to unlock far more of its potential value. They’re actively hunting for other useful data—outside their organizations as well as inside—while keeping their eyes open for opportunities to share their data. But most early datasharing activities are ad hoc. Needed next: fresh approaches to data management.
2012
Accenture Technology Vision 2012
Accenture
Social-driven IT
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other forms of social media are not just new communication channels to customers. They are powerful catalysts that are changing the ways your customers, employees, and partners use technology to interact with the world around them. Most organizations have yet to catch up to that reality, and almost none take full advantage of it. They must.
2012
Accenture Technology Vision 2012
Accenture
PaaS-enabled agility
IT leaders must look beyond cloud debates to pinpoint the business processes and applications that will matter most to their organizations—and that are best suited to a platform-as-a-service model. PaaS is not just a tool for squeezing cost out of IT; it will provide an environment that can support rapid evolution for key business processes that need continuous change.
2012
Accenture Technology Vision 2012
Accenture
Orchestrated analytical security
Nontraditional systems are now getting connected, exposing the organizations that use them in entirely new ways. Organizations will have to make peace with the security reality of today and begin preparing their second line of defense—data platforms—to mitigate the damage of attacks that get through
2012
Accenture Technology Vision 2012
Accenture