10 technology trends and practices for 2012: Quest

IT management company, Quest Software, shared 10 predictions for technology trends and practices in 2012 based on its latest The Experts Conference (TEC) survey.

TEC is the premier annual conference for expert users of Microsoft technologies and Quest Software conducts annual surveys at TEC.

This year, the TEC surveyed 214 delegates, focusing on technology trends, best practices, current issues and priorities.

The company’s 10 predictions for technology trends and practices in 2012 include:

1. SaaS growth will help drive wider adoption of Cloud services, particularly as Cloud service providers overcome security and compliance concerns to accelerate acceptance. The survey found that although SaaS offerings cover the spectrum of business and technical applications, shared business services such as messaging, customer relationship management (CRM) and human resources are the most popular solutions.

2. Cloud service providers must overcome key concerns over compliance, security and access management controls to accelerate acceptance. The company suggested that while not insurmountable, the concerns must be recognised and allayed through better tools and practices, improved auditability and solution certification.

3. Microsoft Hyper-V will make inroads in overcoming VMware’s market dominance. Quest Software believes Hyper-V adoption will slowly erode the market share currently enjoyed by VMWare and position Microsoft as a player in the virtualisation market. It predicted that 2012 will be the year of innovation in Microsoft Hyper-V 3.0 and significant growth in customer numbers.

4. While most organisations are satisfied with their virtual environments, backup, performance monitoring and storage monitoring remain problematic. Divisions between storage teams and virtual environment administrators were surveyed as the likely cause for the dissatisfaction, resulting in the interest in and need for “virtualisation-aware” solutions.

5. While the growth of private and public Cloud usage enables more organisations to support hybrid cloud environments, concerns about security, control and technology maturity lead to isolate internal and external workloads. As a result, the findings showed that the practice of moving excess workload to an external Cloud on an on-demand basis when processing demands exceed internal datacentre resources has yet to gain any traction within IT organisations.

6. Google and Microsoft will strongly challenge Apple’s lead in the IT mobile market and the adoption of new mobile technologies will proceed at an unprecedented rate. Results showed that when deciding which platforms to support, IT administrators face the challenge of balancing current market share and capabilities against long-term potential. Quest Software stated that weaknesses will be fixed over time and administrators will have to manage the devices that will be chosen by the majority of their end users.

7. Cloud applications, compliance and mobile devices will drive a reshaping of corporate identity & access management (IAM) strategies. Quest Software finds that corporate managers want greater transparency in the IAM activities that support compliance-mandated governance processes. Meeting these concerns will result in many changes in how enterprise IT organisations operate and automate on-premises identity systems.

8. Quest Software expects modest growth in both Microsoft and non-Microsoft framework categories over the next year. The survey showed that Active Directory is the identity management platform of choice for enterprises, and the company expects this dominance to increase slightly as some of the remaining users of Novell eDirectory shift to Active Directory.

9. Quest Software predicted that Microsoft will find traction for Office 365 in the small business community, and that this is where most of Microsoft’s growth will come from. It expects Google to continue to struggle in demonstrating its ability to understand the enterprise. It said that the weak performance of Google and Microsoft provides opportunities for new challengers such as VMware’s Zimbra.

10. Employees will face increased monitoring of their social networking activities. Quest Software expects reporting solutions to be implemented and the emergence of more granular controls over time. It also stated that niche vendors who provide granular levels of control for companies subject to compliance regimes also are emerging, causing a positive development for the market.

This is a specialist interest survey and should be approached as such.