5) By year-end 2018, 20 per cent of smart buildings will have suffered from digital vandalism
Inadequate perimeter security will increasingly result in smart buildings being vulnerable to attack.
With exploits ranging from defacing digital signage to plunging whole buildings into prolonged darkness, digital vandalism is a nuisance, rather than a threat. There are, nonetheless, economic, health and safety, and security consequences.
The severity of these consequences depend on the target. Smart building components cannot be considered independently, but must be viewed as part of the larger organisational security process.
Products must be built to offer acceptable levels of protection and hooks for integration into security monitoring and management systems.
6) By 2018, 45 per cent of the fastest-growing companies will have fewer employees than instances of smart machines
Gartner believes the initial group of companies that will leverage smart machine technologies most rapidly and effectively will be startups and other newer companies.
The speed, cost savings, productivity improvements and ability to scale of smart technology for specific tasks offer dramatic advantages over the recruiting, hiring, training and growth demands of human labor.
Some possible examples are a fully automated supermarket or a security firm offering drone-only surveillance services.
The "old guard" (existing) companies, with large amounts of legacy technologies and processes, will not necessarily be the first movers, but the savvier companies among them will be fast followers, as they will recognise the need for competitive parity for either speed or cost.
7) By year-end 2018, customer digital assistant will recognise individuals by face and voice across channels and partners
The last mile for multichannel and exceptional customer experiences will be seamless two-way engagement with customers and will mimic human conversations, with both listening and speaking, a sense of history, in-the-moment context, timing and tone, and the ability to respond, add to and continue with a thought or purpose at multiple occasions and places over time.
Although facial and voice recognition technologies have been largely disparate across multiple channels, customers are willing to adopt these technologies and techniques to help them sift through increasing large amounts of information, choice and purchasing decisions.
This signals an emerging demand for enterprises to deploy customer digital assistants to orchestrate these techniques and to help "glue" continual company and customer conversations.
8) By 2018, two million employees will be required to wear health and fitness tracking devices as a condition of employment
The health and fitness of people employed in jobs that can be dangerous or physically demanding will increasingly be tracked by employers via wearable devices.
Emergency responders, such as police officers, firefighters and paramedics, will likely comprise the largest group of employees required to monitor their health or fitness with wearables.
The primary reason for wearing them is for their own safety. Their heart rates and respiration, and potentially their stress levels, could be remotely monitored and help could be sent immediately if needed.
In addition to emergency responders, a portion of employees in other critical roles will be required to wear health and fitness monitors, including professional athletes, political leaders, airline pilots, industrial workers and remote field workers.
9) By 2020, smart agents will facilitate 40 per cent of mobile interactions, and the post-app era will begin to dominate
Smart agent technologies, in the form of virtual personal assistants (VPAs) and other agents, will monitor user content and behaviour in conjunction with cloud-hosted neural networks to build and maintain data models from which the technology will draw inferences about people, content and contexts.
Based on these information-gathering and model-building efforts, VPAs can predict users' needs, build trust and ultimately act autonomously on the user's behalf.
10) Through 2020, 95 per cent of Cloud security failures will be the customer's fault
Security concerns remain the most common reason for avoiding the use of public Cloud services. However, only a small percentage of the security incidents impacting enterprises using the Cloud have been due to vulnerabilities that were the provider's fault.
This does not mean that organisations should assume that using a Cloud means that whatever they do within that cloud will necessarily be secure.
The characteristics of the parts of the Cloud stack under customer control can make cloud computing a highly efficient way for naive users to leverage poor practices, which can easily result in widespread security or compliance failures.
The growing recognition of the enterprise's responsibility for the appropriate use of the public Cloud is reflected in the growing market for cloud control tools.
By 2018, 50 percent of enterprises with more than 1000 users will use Cloud access security broker products to monitor and manage their use of SaaS and other forms of public Cloud, reflecting the growing recognition that although Clouds are usually secure, the secure use of public Clouds requires explicit effort on the part of the Cloud customer.
