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The continued convergence of technologies for security, information management and compliance will make possible a new level of automation for IT - and organisations will be looking to IT to guide them through the process.
There has been a constant stream of change in virtualisation technologies over the past two years.
The first wave of virtualisation focused on specific platforms and hardware such as storage, servers, networks, and desktops. As virtualisation becomes commoditised, the next wave of this technology will change the way software is delivered, managed and consumed at the endpoint, thereby improving user productivity while reducing IT complexity.
Businesses need to use virtualisation to separate out valuable information, manage it easily, protect it completely and control it automatically.
In the last two years there has been a massive information explosion.
Today organisations are dealing with petabytes of data - and the amount is growing. The amount of stored information is growing at 50 percent a year.
Information is as distributed and mobile as today's workforce. It lives in hard-to-protect unstructured formats - e-mail, spreadsheets, and instant messages.
In the past, IT departments never saw the power bill - all this has now changed, and well-proven technologies are being marshalled to address the issue of cost and carbon.
Australian businesses are a pragmatic lot. They are focused on either making money or saving money - and always doing what they can with what they have.
The Green push of late tends to manifest itself for Australian businesses in the practicalities of a) running out of power b) running out of space and c) recognising the cost of power from a dollar and carbon perspective.
IT Storage consumes over 30% of the power required in a typical data centre, and is the fastest growing IT infrastructure element as our world thrives on data. This puts it right into the cross-hairs of consideration when discussing power consumption and carbon overhead.
In the last 18 months, I have seen a distinct shift in customer thinking and focus around technologies that can provide tangible cost savings in these areas. For example, the use of "thin provisioning" to reduce physical storage consumption has become a mandatory requirement for new storage footprint.
It's no secret the Federal government wants to reinvigorate Australian innovation policy.
In the last month alone, the government announced more than 630 submissions have been received towards its Review of the National Innovation System. It also launched a national program of festivals to increase innovation awareness in the wider community.
We know innovation is central to Australia's economic future, arresting the ‘brain drain' and ensuring we continue to build strong, non-resources led, alternative export industries, among other macroeconomic drivers. We also know that government policy provides a strong foundation for fostering and encouraging innovation.
But it's also up to industry and the businesses within them to make incisive judgements on how to best leverage the skills and resources they have to ensure Australia retains a reputation for innovation, particularly on the international stage.
Consider these examples. If we cast our eyes back to the contract manufacturing boom in the late '90s and early '00s, there was a call to action to Australian business to focus on the value-added areas where we are traditionally strong - engineering, design and R&D - rather than on trying to keep dwindling local production facilities open.
The world's leading analysts predict that energy costs will be eating up more than a third of IT budgets within the next five years, says Sundeep Khisty.
Global warming has emerged as the critical issue of the 21st Century. While governments worldwide debate the best formula to cut greenhouse gas emissions, change is inevitable.
Most world leaders concede that global warming is the fault of human kind and that intervention is a priority.
A recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), left little doubt on the issue. Drawing on work by 2500 scientists, the UN-backed IPCC concluded that it was more than 90 per cent likely that recent warming has a predominantly human cause.
With the recent explosion of ground-breaking standardised ICT protocols we are witnessing the ever increasing development of wealth-producing technologies and business models. These business models exploit easily accessible and interoperable global networks, information and knowledge.
Underlying most technologies and business models is the ubiquitous and somewhat ephemeral world of standards. Standards support wealth creation by enabling the development of global production networks characterized by outsourcing, the de-verticalization of corporate structure, and new forms of “technological fusion” in which disparate technologies are brought together to achieve new products that exhibit novel performance characteristics and functionality.
The nature of this global techno-economic system places a premium on interoperability and creates a new level of demand for acceptable standards. Standards have also become increasingly important for the international economy and according to the World Trade Organisation underlie 80% of world trade in the exchange of goods and services. They form a fundamental part of bi-lateral and multi-lateral trade agreements.
There are potentially hundreds, if not thousands of ways in which we can reduce ICT's consumption of energy - we just don't have the mechanism to capture this innovation, quantify its environmental benefit and share it with corporate Australia.
One of the areas of focus for my role at Dimension Data is Green IT, and in that capacity I have attended or spoken at a number of ICT and climate change conferences over the past 12 months. At these events I've found that there is always at least one amazing green concept or innovation presented - but once the conference is over, what happens to those ideas?
Last month, I participated in a media roundtable together with other industry representatives. One of the speakers was John Maunder, CIO at the South Australian Department of Transport, Energy & Infrastructure who presented a range of lateral ideas on ways in which his department's ICT infrastructure can contribute to reducing our impact on the environment. John spoke about the idea of enabling Wi-Fi access on public transport to make it a more attractive option to commuters and thereby increase utilisation. He also explained how traffic flow systems can be applied intelligently to ensure that peak hour traffic is kept moving, reducing the time that vehicles spend on the road emitting carbon.
However, the most compelling concept John put forward was to propose that we get serious about "hot rock" technology - geothermal energy. He also suggested that we should locate data centres - one of the most significant energy consumers in ICT - at the source of these geothermal energy plants, such as in Central Australia, and transfer data from these centres to our major business centres over fibre optic cable. Why do this? Because transmitting electricity over long distances involves significant energy loss (up to 70 percent in some instances).
