#CiscoChampion Radio, S3|Ep. 2. Cisco Champions Crystal Ball: Your Predictions for 2016

#CiscoChampion Radio is a podcast series by Cisco Champions as technologists. Today we’re discussing Cisco Champions Crystal Ball: Your Predictions for 2016 with Cisco Subject Matter Experts Kim Austin.

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Cisco Champion Guest Hosts

• Dave Henry (@davemhenry)
• Ed Walsh (@vEddieW)
• Brad Hayes (@gk_bradhayes)

Moderator

• Kim Austin (@ciscokima)

Highlights

Predictions by Champions:

Dave Henry:

• More consolidation in the storage industry.
• 2016 Hyperconverged infrastructure going to get really hot (maybe an acquisition).
• Security breaches are going to hit the headlines and stay in the headlines. Something so bad is going to happen that people finally say “Lets do something about it.”
• Blog post about Dave’s predictions in 2016

Ed Walsh:

• Impacts of transition to digital economy – companies are struggling with adjusting their applications accordingly – growth in application development needs.
• Acceleration of off-prem cloud/service provider utilization for IT. More organization getting out of the IT business.
• More unicorns not making it to a successful IPO or acquisition – more consolidation in those areas. Consolidation occurs in 2 waves – acquisition and IPO, 2^nd we run out of money and someone buys our assets

Brad Hayes:

• Megatrends will continue – big data, analytics, cloud, IOT
• Digitization or die; have to be disruptive (Airbnb, uber)
• Certification and changing role of IT – value in training for nontech skills

Security:

• There will be a big enough security issue for people to take it more seriously. IoT will play into this? Hoping that people start taking it seriously before something bad happens. Good examples are smart cars, navigation devices on cars.
  • Bill Burnam: “Imagine that with driverless cars”
• Is there a generation difference on how the different generations feel about security?
  • This generation puts everything online
  • Lauren: “Younger gen may be posting ‘everything’ online… but they are also driving force behind popularity of social networks that delete comments after a short time.”
  • Ed: “It seems many people are willing to give up certain privacy for convenience.”
  • Some things just don’t need to be on the network.
  • Ed: “@Dave good point. Self-control of data sharing is critical.”
  • Brad: “Lucky we have Sourcefire”
  • Bill: “Personal medical devices + hacking = bad.”
• More people interested in learning code.
• Change the name of mobile phones since most people don’t use their phones to make phone calls
• The attack service has multiplied
• Dave: predicts that in 2016 we will see the third hack that actually creates physical damage somewhere. So far this has only happened twice. Normally if the hack is digital it stays in the digital world.
• Dave: “Data breaches are now organized crime” no one can even go through the logs fast enough to catch.
• Ed: We usually review logs to see what happened in a security breach. I think great opportunity to implement analytics, and machine learning to improve detection before hand, anomalies.”

Storage:

• Ed: Storage industry consolidations. Consolidation occurs in 2 waves – acquisition and IPO, 2^nd we run out of money and someone buys our assets.
  • Companies that leverage flash media will struggle
  • Moving to public cloud providers
  • Cloud is the new wave of things.
  • Dave: “we will start to see a shift in how companies address object storage.”
  • Ed: “FCoE and the legacy platforms will exist for many years. We are still running mainframe. Not growing but not going away either.”
  • Dave: “A frightening number of major banks still run mainframe. Legacy platforms that work tend to have a long lifetime…”

Analytics:

• Brad: “We have all this data out there, what are we doing about it?”
• Are people running Google Analytics?
• Business wise running analytics are important to companies so they better understand their customers.
• Amazon does really well with analytics. Sometimes it feels helpful and sometimes it feel intrusive
• Ed: “The amount of digital data is going to double every two years.” Customer quote “I have plenty of data but now I need…”
• Data’s not useful if all you do is collect it. How do you pull actionable intelligence and use it?
  • More data is being created by devices not by humans
  • Ed: “I have plenty of data, what I need is more information. How do I use analytics to make it more actionable. See it more in line of business – analyzing the data sets they have. How do we allow analysis of data to happen faster – no lack of storage and computer power. But what’s the network impact to all of these things. Huge appetite to collect more and more data – IOT. GE’s wind turbines are a great example”
  • Jon Hildebrand: I can’t remember exactly where I saw this stat, but I remember someplace stating the average application lifetime is somewhere in the 14 year range. Those of us old of to remember Y2K probably aren’t too surprised by some of these comments.”
  • Kim A: “You couldn’t even watch every cat video on YouTube in a lifetime at this point…”
  • We don’t do a good job in analyzing the data.
  • Scott Morris: “the information you collect is only as good as when you look at it.”
  • IBM Watson – create your own user account
  • Great opportunity for DC to get a whole lot smarter.

 

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