In March 2014, I had the pleasure to spend the day at CeBIT, the world’s largest and most international Information, communications, and technology conference. I viewed a few exhibition stands and attended a few conference presentations.
I walked away with two impressions: (1) the digitization affect every aspect of our lives and (2) the number one concern of business and governments is cyber security. At that time it was thanks to Snowden (and more recently it is thanks to North Korea).
My digitization conclusion started when I saw the NAS servers for the home with backup options to the cloud. I can envision it now–a wash room with the washer and dryer for my cloths and a data center with all my servers, fiber connections, and various monitoring equipment. Further digitizations options extended to the car (VW), to online shopping (zoolando), to medical treatment options, to educational systems, and to luggage with monitoring options.
Regarding cybersecuity, the buzz was related to European laws that data should not be stored on servers in the United States. There were several technology and services solutions presented in this regards. Further debates related to having or not having national internets, including the benefits and drawbacks, the advantages and disadvantage, and the political and business implications.
I end the year with the view that the key trends in 2015 will be:
- big data, including analyzing and using all that sensor data
- cloud computing for business and home,
- digitization in every aspect of life, and
- cyber security.