Technology is constantly evolving, but that doesn’t mean every business needs to jump on the latest fad. Here are some major trends that businesses should be looking at in 2018.
Enough acronyms for you? Well, they both have to do with one word: mobile. Bring your own device (BYOD) and mobile device management (MDM) are two sides of the same coin. As employees continue to want to work on their own personal devices when away from the office, businesses are likewise continuing to enjoy the cost-savings of not having to invest in the mobile device hardware. The one major challenge? Safeguarding company data. MDM is software that allows business IT departments (or their IT partners) to manage access to corporate data on personal phones and tablets. Look for the proliferation of MDM to continue to expand in 2018, changing the meaning of the traditional corporate network.
MDM is the piece of cybersecurity protection for businesses that deals with mobility. But cybersecurity planning and protection–especially for businesses in regulated industries–will continue to increase rapidly in 2018 across on-premise network installations as well. The pace and severity of threats –and the liabilities–are simply increasing too rapidly for businesses to ignore the issue or delay investment in protection. This includes robust investments in data backup.
There is so much news and hype about ‘the cloud’ that the pace and magnitude of the change this is driving for business can actually be taken for granted to a degree. The major outlines of how cloud computing will work for many years to come have been established. The concerns over data safety (as compared with on-premise data solutions) are fading and the nature of business technology is changing quickly on the ground–especially for small and medium sized businesses.
5G is the fifth generation of cellular communications and it will increase speeds and reduce network latency dramatically. It will not affect most businesses in 2018, but it will start to be rolled out by companies like AT&T this year in a limited number of US cities. As its availability expands, it will have a dramatic effect on business and their use of ‘connected’ devices.