Trends Identified
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
Data Takes its Rightful Place as a Platform
Generations of programmers and architects have grown up thinking in terms of applications—seeing the world through the lens of the functions that the business has needed and with data being the object, not the subject. That thinking will change. Although a focus on applications will continue to be important, it will give way to an emphasis on data. It is our belief that in the near future, platform architectures will be selected primarily to cope with soaring volumes of data and the complexity of data management—not for their ability to support this or that application.
2011
Accenture Technology Vision 2011
Accenture
Analytics Is Driving a Discontinuous Evolution from BI
Analytics drives insights; insights lead to greater understanding of customers and markets; that understanding yields innovative products, better customer targeting, improved pricing, and superior growth in both revenue and profits. That’s why farsighted companies are viewing analytics as essential for creating value. In contrast, their peers who think about analytics only as a simple extension of business intelligence (BI) are severely underestimating the potential of analytics to move the needle on the business. For one thing, they overlook the fact that traditional BI does not address the wealth of unstructured data that is now available.
2011
Accenture Technology Vision 2011
Accenture
Cloud Computing Will Create More Value Higher up the Stack
There’s no denying the momentum of cloud computing. Accenture’s research shows that enterprises are already moving applications into the cloud. 1,2 The demand is anything but an IT fad; it is coming from a host of business functions. And it is truly a global phenomenon; companies everywhere from Brazil to China are moving ahead rapidly with adoption. It’s clear that IT and business executives should expect cloud computing to become ever more pervasive– to the point that the term “cloud computing” itself becomes superfluous. But what’s needed now is a shift in thinking from obvious but nondifferentiating benefits such as cost reduction through cloud infrastructure to where the cloud will have its real impact. When we look at the different facets of cloud computing – Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platformas- a-Service (PaaS), and so on – it is easier to see that most of the current emphasis on cloud is focused on the lower levels of the technology stack. For many large enterprises, the logical next step after virtualizing their data centers has been to leverage IaaS to augment those centers.
2011
Accenture Technology Vision 2011
Accenture
Architecture Will Shift from Server-centric to Service-centric
Information technology is evolving from a world that is server-centric to one that is service-centric. Companies are quickly moving away from monolithic systems that were wedded to one or more servers toward finer-grained, reusable services distributed inside and outside the enterprise. The evolution is being driven by the ongoing maturation of supporting tools, frameworks, and methodologies. There is still much to be done to decouple infrastructure, systems, applications, and business processes from one another. This shift has major repercussions for all levels of the enterprise architecture stack, from infrastructure to applications. Decoupling will enable components to operate independently while making software architectures reconfigurable during run time to adapt to various environments and design objectives, which will increase the flexibility of application deployment and maintenance. Although dynamic reconfiguration is not a new concept in academia, advances in cloud technology at all layers of the stack create a burning platform for such architecture.
2011
Accenture Technology Vision 2011
Accenture
IT Security Will Respond Rapidly, Progressively—and in Proportion
There is no such thing as watertight IT security. Yet for years, business and technology leaders have acted as if the only alternative to a “fully secure” state is an unacceptable “fully breached” state. This “fortress mentality” is outdated— and no longer realistic or practical. Leading security specialists are devising reflex-like systems whose responses step up with the severity of the breach. In extreme cases, counterattacks may even become part of an organization’s repertoire of responses. We believe that new security solutions and architectures will, like human reflexes, respond instinctively to the growing speed, scale, and variety of attacks. This implies that for the first line of defense, people will not be part of the decision loops; the speed and frequency of attacks dictate that human responses must make way for automated capabilities that detect, assess, and respond immediately. And the increasing “attack surface” – across more devices, more systems, more people, more business partners, and broader physical infrastructure— supports the case for automated capabilities that detect, assess, and respond to external threats immediately.
2011
Accenture Technology Vision 2011
Accenture
Data Privacy Will Adopt a Risk-based Approach
In an age when WikiLeaks has become a household name, every business leader is right to be even more paranoid about data privacy. Just as leading organizations now realize there is no such thing as 100 percent IT security, so complete data privacy is being exposed as a myth. In one study, the Wall Street Journal assessed and analyzed the cookies and other surveillance technology that companies use on the Internet. The study found that the nation’s 50 top web sites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites installed more than a hundred each. 9 It will not be enough simply to accept the reality of data leaks. It will require very proactive responses from organizations to understand the risks surrounding the use and misuse of personal data. And it will require constant vigilance because things are changing so fast.
2011
Accenture Technology Vision 2011
Accenture