2016 was quite a wild ride for pop culture, the internet, and the world alike, and many of us are very much looking forward to seeing what 2017 will bring. For our fourth year running, we asked a handful of Dyn’s tech gurus to try their hand at the question of what’s ahead. Enjoy!
The Year of Big Data
“Two of the greatest strengths of the internet, privacy and diversity, continue their headlong race to oblivion in 2017. The universal move to the cloud eliminates all but a handful of players with the global scope and deep enough pockets to establish a points presence in all major markets. The use of smartphones for every conceivable transaction (e.g., mobile payments, banking, dating, navigation, entertainment, checking into flights, opening hotel rooms, etc.) and the fact they are uniquely tied to an individual, eliminates all pretense of privacy. The rise of IoT completes the total surveillance picture. Big data science comes to the fore in the Orwellian world we are creating as a means to extract maximum corporate value from the firehose of data emanating from these devices.”
Earl Zmijewski, VP of Data Analytics
The Year of Fighting for Control
“There will be a continued erosion of the single, global internet as both commercial and government entities try to control and capture the distribution of content, commerce and communication over the common internet. This will put a growing premium on industry and policy efforts to keep the freedom that has driven the last 30+ years of innovation and breaking down of global barriers. It also requires sophisticated data and tools to understand and react to changes to the structure of the internet.”
Scott Hilton, EVP of Product
The Year of Shifts in Cloud Adoption
“Cloud adoption patterns will begin to shift. Up until now, the spend has quickly moved to SaaS applications like Salesforce, Google Apps, Concur, Jira, etc. These were easy choices for enterprises of all sizes and maturity levels because they enabled the business, but did not actually run the business. During 2017 we will enter a more difficult phase in cloud adoption across the largest enterprises in the world. Those enterprises rely on complicated, custom built applications and databases to manage their business. If the decision tree for migrating these applications to the cloud involves re-building those applications or fork-lifting them to the cloud, a hybrid solution will be the most likely scenario. Version 2.0 of cloud infrastructure will emerge to provide the additional security, flexibility and scalability for these large enterprises. Additional connectivity between across enterprise data centers and cloud locations combined with flexible in-cloud networking will change the way an enterprise views the cloud from an uncontrolled compute resource to a true extension of the enterprise network.”
Charlie Baker, VP of Product Management
The Year of DDoS
“IoT devices will provide fertile ground for a highly distributed criminal and nation state infrastructure as a service platforms. Additional vulnerabilities will be found in currently connected devices and new insecure devices will continue to be be added to the network which will facilitate scale. Subject matter experts will increase persistence of the infection on the device increasing the types of business models that can be supported to expand beyond DDoS. The looming threat of DDoS from these platforms will increase the cost of operating internet facing services increasing consolidation of services to lower the unit cost of the bandwidth/routing gear required to offer a sufficient SLA.
“2017 will see continued consolidation in the network space as transit and eyeball networks are collapsed. The trend of network/media company consolidation will continue as the data collected operating in both spheres are consolidated to improve targeted ads and investments in content for the networks. This will be especially lucrative for the mobile sector as consumption of mobile content continues to grow and the race to develop the proper ad delivery and tracking tries to keep pace.”
Chris Baker, Principal Threat Analyst
The Year of Automated Travel
“As automobiles become increasingly autonomous, they will bring sophisticated networking along for the ride. 2017 will see the dawn of a pseudo-mesh encompassing our vehicles (possibly via OBD devices and/or the mobile phones we carry inside of them), allowing for more responsive realtime navigation, communication, coordination, and control systems — but unfortunately also for new kinds of attacks, as they become both vectors and targets. Regardless, it is likely to be a fundamental building block for future developments.”
Richard Gibson, Architect
The Year of WAN
“2017 will see an increase in reverse transit transformation; MPLS conversion back to Public IP WANs within enterprises. Cheaper Layer 3 internet services will allow clients to have more applications closer to their end-user proximities globally. However, driving back to Public IP will require further adoption of IPv6 as well and addresses the performance issues with some cloud workloads.”
Gary Sloper, VP of Global Sales Engineering
The Year of Specialization
“2017 will see further consolidation in the cloud service provider market in three ways. 1) acquisition of smaller cloud offerings by larger cloud provider, private equity, and adjacent industries, 2) specialization of midsized cloud providers into more focused offerings to compete against larger cloud providers, and 3) combining or reduction of cloud offerings from large providers across separate IaaS, PaaS and SaaS platforms. So what does this mean? Enterprises need to protect their business by picking their cloud partners thoughtfully, even selecting multiple cloud partners and technologies, and to develop flexible architectures and service environments to allow for change.”
Mike Kane, Senior Product Marketing Manager
The Year of Consolidation
“The technology industry will continue to see consolidation of companies like never before with both the major players making further moves and non-historically ‘tech first’ companies buying innovation from the startup ecosystem. Dyn getting acquired by Oracle is continued proof in the power of building great best-of-breed technology that becomes a part of a portfolio delivered as a platform. We’ll see the trend in media, ecommerce, SaaS, infrastructure, advertising and more as the internet continues to enable an even more connected world.”
Kyle York, Chief Strategy Officer
The Year of Autonomy
What Mike K., Chris B., and Kyle Y. said regarding consolidation — the industry is ripe for consolidation across the three areas Mike suggests and the consolidation and larger platform trend that was observed beginning in late 2015 through 2016 will pick up steam in 2017.
In response to the growing threats from the use of highly distributed connected devices as principal sources of internet attack vectors, there will be calls from government and industry bodies to provide stronger safeguards against them, and companies and industry-sectors will band together to establish stronger “best practices” defenses against the threats, including real-time information sharing, coordinated communal threat responses and possibly even infrastructure sharing.
Throughout the infrastructure layer, the industry will begin to move toward a much more autonomic means of optimizing performance and expense, using Machine Learning techniques to provide much more proactive responses to changing conditions, sharing of understanding of operational loads at various nodes in the network via APIs, and intelligence on customers’ experience with web properties and applications. This will improve user experience and provide a more robust network for customers to move more of their estate workloads to the cloud.
Blockchain – a distributed database where trust is established through mass collaboration and clever code rather than a centralized authority or “source of truth” – is the “next big thing” in computer science and the unleashing of technology across the internet. How it is harnessed beyond the world of financial services, whether for good or not-so-good purposes, will begin to be put to the test in 2017. Will the “wild west” of a hyper-innovation cycle overrun the abilities of the industry to ensure security with or without industry oversight/standards bodies keeping pace?
Phil Francisco, VP of Product Management & Product Marketing
Source: Dyn