Technology Trends of 2012

The consumer technology market is affecting the corporate world

Welcome to my annual technology trends column, where I wade through the bits and bytes of the computerized world and identify the stories that will define the coming year. A tall order, indeed, that I usually meet by pointing to the trends that will affect our corporate lives. 

But this year I’m covering the consumer angle as well. Why?  Because trends in the consumer market are affecting the corporate world.

Trend #1: Kindle Lights a Fire

One year ago I said that 2011 would be the Year of the Tablets. Not one tablet, many tablets. But especially Apple’s iPad.

Turns out I was right. You could argue that 2011 was the Year of the iPad, but the past year taught all tablet makers one important lesson: price matters.

When Hewlett-Packard held a fire sale to rid itself of the TouchPad, it sold more units than Apple’s almighty product, albeit at a deeply discounted price.

Taking note, Amazon released a new Kindle e-reader, the Kindle Fire, just in time for the holiday season, featuring Google Android, a web browser and a host of apps, all at less than the cost it takes to produce one. But unlike any tablet maker other than Apple, Amazon has its own store of books, movies and videos, plus distribution agreements with movie studios, record labels and publishing houses.

That’s why the Kindle Fire is subsidized. It goes back to the Gillette (or Crest) model. Give someone a razor (or a toothbrush) and you can sell them shaving cream (or toothpaste) for life. Amazon hopes to sell people media content for life. The result? The personal tablet market has split into two camps: the high-end Apple iPad and the low-end Kindle Fire.

So what does this mean for the business market? My prediction for 2012: iPads and Fires will start appearing in your office, with employees wanting to use them for business.

The tough part is that both devices are engineered for consumers rather than the corporate market. But as long as Apple and Amazon can subsidize their hardware via consumer-based media content, they might just corner the corporate market.

Trend #2: Content to the Clouds

Where do you store your digital music, pictures, books and movies? 10 years ago you stored them on your personal computer, right? But today you store them on a variety of gadgets — your cellphone, your tablet, your laptop, your mobile listening device.

Steve Jobs called this online repository of data a “digital hub,” and, as he explained to Walter Isaacson, his biographer, “over the next few years, the hub is going to move from your computer into the cloud.”

The fact is, consumers are getting more and more demanding. They want their content — music, pictures, books and movies — wherever and whenever they feel like it. So I predict that another major trend of 2012 will be the move of consumer content to the clouds. Because even if you’re not an Apple user, the move to the clouds is coming no matter whose hardware you use.

Apple is already marketing cloud computing to its customers (“Your content. On all your devices.”) through the iCloud, promising “automatic, effortless, and seamless” integration between mobile devices.

Surprisingly, consumers don’t seem overly concerned about their privacy or the security of their data — they just assume that their cloud provider will protect their information.

But the corporate world is different. Business does not and will not take security for granted. As consumer demand drives the proliferation of cloud storage services, companies continue to explore the benefits of data storage and the software as a service model (SaaS, sometimes called “software on demand”), while others are looking for cloud-based environments that resemble a desktop computer, and are looking at the platform as a service model (PaaS).

Others still are willing to go further and want the whole underlying connection of servers, databases and network systems  available as infrastructure as a service, or IaaS.

But there’s no doubt in my mind that, as consumers adjust to the concept of storing and managing their personal data in an environment that, strictly speaking, is not their own, our acceptance of a digital hub in the clouds will continue to drive the further adoption and enhancement of cloud computing in the corporate sector.

Trend #3: Corporate Security & Consumers

In 2011, a new type of cyberattack, Advanced Persistent Threat (APT), came to the forefront. APTs target organizations. Their perpetrators learn everything about their target and its employees in order to masquerade as them electronically and attack their defences and access controls. The end goal is to steal privileged information about customers, clients or trade secrets.

PWC just released its Global State of Information Security Survey for 2012, in which it surveyed retail and consumer industry executives for feedback on their information security practices. It found that, while executives were not confident about their security systems, a majority of respondents “revealed that

their organization’s security policy does not address APT, nor do they have the capabilities and tools to combat it.”

Welcome to 2012. The Year of Tablets, Clouds and Persistent Threats.