In wrapping up our look at what the next decade’s converged computing and communications capabilities will look like, there are some fundamental issues that were important (in a different form) ten years ago that will continue to need to be addressed. And while we are not so bold as to indicate *how* they will be resolved, they are with us to stay.
In wrapping up our look at what the next decade’s converged computing and communications capabilities will look like, there are some fundamental issues that were important (in a different form) 10 years ago that will continue to need to be addressed. And while we are not so bold as to indicate how they will be resolved, they are with us to stay.
Also read: Top 10 issues – December 2000
In fact, we’ll break these challenges down into three major areas: Security, Performance and Legislation.
Let’s start with security. A decade ago, security was relatively simple. The world consisted primarily of private or virtual private networks, so there was only limited connectivity. The idea of offering Internet-based connectivity to the corporate network was nascent. In fact, again in reviewing our archives. We think we first wrote about Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks just over 10 years ago. And this intrinsic vulnerability is still around, recently being in the popular press concerning DDoS attacks against the “WikiLeaks” site.
An interconnected world brings with it great potential for both good and evil. So a major focus will continue to be on securing networks – and especially on the extremely difficult question of maintaining corporate security while allowing access via a wide range of mobile devices.
Unfortunately, the Internet was developed with the false assumption that the participants would obey the rules. And the openness based on this assumption has been abused.
Consequently, we will indeed be so rash as to predict that there may very well be a “parallel” commercial Internet developed in which tighter rules are enforced and accepted in exchange for having a less vulnerable network. (Unfortunately, security still comes down to personal, rather than network, integrity. So long as people run networks, employees remain the greatest risk factor.)
And speaking of personnel, this is not necessarily an optimistic view, but we hardly see any way that we will ever return to the number of individuals that existed a decade ago employed in IT and telecommunications. With advanced network technology and cloud-based services, we simply will not require as many people who are basically doing parallel jobs.
So while our industry is clearly in the midst of a “recovery,” we must admit that it will probably be a recovery in which few jobs are created to accompany the corporate revenues.
Next time we’ll wrap up this discussion by addressing performance and legislation.
