Seven important research findings and what they tell us about the industry in 2016

Computing research lifts the lid on cloud, DevOps, data science and IT buying patterns

Last year Computing undertook a number in-depth research programmes into DevOps, big data, IoT, cloud and infrastructure, IT security and IT buying patterns. Here are some of the interesting things we discovered.

Digital needs DevOps

'Digital transformation', surely the buzzphrase of 2016, is all about finding improved methods of communicating with customers and partners and being more flexible in reacting to their needs and wants.

For many organisations bespoke software is a large part of this process. Buggy, insecure, outdated applications and utilities just won't do when they are interfere with an organisation's public face, which is where DevOps comes in. By bringing together the developer and operations functions the idea is to remove bottlenecks in production, shorten the production lifecycle and improve quality - and hopefully provide a better user experience.

Asked how important a DevOps structure is to digital transformation, 65 per cent of respondents said it was important, rating it five or more on a seven-point scale. In contrast, just 14 per cent rated it three or below.

Among organisations that are already working in a DevOps way, these numbers were even more supportive of the link, with 72 per cent rating its importance five or above.

A senior DevOps engineer in government explained: "You don't need DevOps to be digital, but if you move to digital for your end users, you will move faster if you are agile. You need to be agile to be efficient in digital... To be digital it makes sense to be agile and to be agile it makes sense to be DevOps..."

DevOps is helping larger organisations behave more like smaller ones, he added.

"It was initially the start-ups doing this, but now some of the big companies are catching up".

Conclusion: Software is changing everything and the way companies write and deliver it is becoming a differentiator.

Further reading: Computing DevOps Review 2016

Seven important research findings and what they tell us about the industry in 2016

Computing research lifts the lid on cloud, DevOps, data science and IT buying patterns

Seems everyone's a data scientist now

Because of their scarcity, the data scientist has been subject to "definition creep". As an illustration, when Computing asked organisations whether or not they employ data scientists, the most popular answer was: "Yes, but we call them data analysts".

This raises an obvious question: is a data scientist really any different from a data analyst - or indeed a data engineer, a business analyst, or any number of similar roles?

There is certainly some overlap between these and similar positions, and for smaller and less data-centric firms they may be roughly equivalent: a data analyst is a BI specialist is a data scientist. All can be extremely valuable in teasing useful information and insight from raw data.

For large data-centric firms, though, there are distinct differences. Apart from commanding a much higher salary, a data scientist will generally be qualified to Masters or PhD level and will have more advanced statistical and modelling skills, as well as domain expertise in their field.

And while data analysts and BI professionals are focused more on historical data, data scientists are likely to be combining this with real-time streaming and external data to build a picture of what is likely to happen by building machine-learning algorithms. This is where they bring real value.

Conclusion: For most businesses a data analyst will do just fine, but if you're really serious about predictive analytics you'll have to fork out for the real thing.

Further reading: Computing Big Data Review 2016

Seven important research findings and what they tell us about the industry in 2016

Computing research lifts the lid on cloud, DevOps, data science and IT buying patterns

IoT: many dots still to join

Millions of words were written about IoT in 2016, but arguably, there is still little to show for them.

The dearth of real-world case studies and high-profile examples of the IoT in action is likely to be holding back adoption at the moment. There are concerns about interoperability, which connectivity protocols will win out and what sort of RoI can be achieved at the moment.

But top of the list were concerns over security.

"What would be a problem is securing the thing - cyber security can't be bolted on after the fact," said the head architect in construction, and yet it so often is. It is characteristic of a technology market in its infancy that businesses rush to get something out there and that security tends to be an afterthought rather than an intrinsic part of the development process - mobile applications being a prime example. With something as all-encompassing as the IoT this would be a very serious mistake.

Privacy is another issue of concern. The IoT is all about making technology invisible. Rather than having to type instructions on a keyboard, the idea is that technology will respond to our needs naturally, without us really noticing. This sounds fantastic, but essentially it makes us all passive rather than active participants in the generation and dissemination of data.

We will not know what the information will ultimately be used for - and should bear in mind that smart does not necessarily mean benevolent.

"I am really worried about the Big Brother surveillance aspects," said a technology lawyer.

"Everybody's going to know pretty much everything about everybody - or at least there is the possibility to get access to all of that information. There's potentially a much broader cultural issue in the disruption to communities..."

This person was not alone. Neither existing privacy and data protection technologies nor the legal frameworks that drive them were thought to be anywhere near sufficient.

The incompatibility of connectivity protocols came third on the list. These results show that the industry as a whole needs to come together to address some fairly fundamental issues if an IoT that is beneficial to us all rather than just the writers of the algorithms and providers of the platforms is to come into being.

Conclusion: Business, the industry and society at large are unprepared for the changes the IoT will bring.

Further reading: Computing Internet of Things Review 2016

Seven important research findings and what they tell us about the industry in 2016

Computing research lifts the lid on cloud, DevOps, data science and IT buying patterns

GDPR is focusing minds

Larger organisations are getting ready for the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other regulations while their smaller counterparts have their hands full with operational matters such as disaster recovery.

GDPR was the top priority for larger businesses with 58 per cent choosing it; this ranked third on the list for smaller businesses at 44 per cent. Data governance ranked as the second highest scoring priority for large firms with 49 per cent choosing it, while only 33 per cent of smaller companies did so.

Large organisations will find some aspects of the GDPR particularly challenging, such as complying with the right of citizens to demand to erasure of all their personal data. This data may be spread across thousands of systems and duplicated many times. They only have 18 months to update systems, controls and governance frameworks to make them compliant.

Smaller firms tend to have a more immediate focus on profit and loss and compliance is likely to be less complicated with fewer premises and partners to consider. This probably accounts for the variation in rankings between the two groups.

Disaster recovery was the top priority for those employing fewer than 500 people, selected by 58 per cent of respondents; this ranked fourth for larger firms with 38 per cent selecting it as a priority. Such firms are perhaps more likely to view disaster recovery as an operational concern rather than a security focused issue.

Conclusion: Having been ‘around the corner' for a number of years, GDPR has now loomed into view and big companies are realising the extent of what it implies for complex organisations like theirs.

Further reading: Computing Enterprise Security Review 2016

Seven important research findings and what they tell us about the industry in 2016

Computing research lifts the lid on cloud, DevOps, data science and IT buying patterns

Cloud: up and up

The hype has been with us seemingly forever, but in the past couple of years cloud has emerged a genuine contender when companies select the most economic, forward-looking and flexible way to run their IT; so much so, in fact, that the long-term future of many in-house data centres has to be in serious doubt in the face the muscle-flexing marketing might of bruisers like Amazon and Microsoft.

In the case of cloud the direction of travel is clear: three quarters of those surveyed in our quantitative survey expect their use of cloud services to increase over the next 12 months.

The growing significance of cloud was also reflected in the number of people saying they expect external hosting or cloud services to be the mainstay of their IT systems. Thirty-two per cent predict this will be the case in two years' time, compared with a figure of 10 per cent today.

The number of organisations saying that cloud will be their main area of IT spend is also increasing, from 22 per cent when we asked that question last year to 29 per cent now.

Of course, future projections of this kind are prone to various types of bias and we would not expect these numbers to be particularly precise, but they do show that cloud has now firmly entered the mainstream.

The meteoric rate of growth in use of cloud services (Microsoft and Amazon reported near triple-digit percentage revenue increases year on year during 2016) and the services that depend on it (e.g. mobility, web-based services) mean that, strategically speaking, cloud really must be considered as a break with the past, not just by internet start-ups, but by more traditional businesses and the public sector too.

It's been some time coming, but the cloud first strategy - deploying new services and applications in the cloud unless there is good reason not to - has arrived.

Conclusion: Organisations have grown increasingly comfortable with moving operational data and workloads to cloud platforms.

Further reading: Computing Cloud & Infrastructure Review 2016

Seven important research findings and what they tell us about the industry in 2016

Computing research lifts the lid on cloud, DevOps, data science and IT buying patterns

Cloud is growing, but...

A majority of the firms we polled still maintain core systems on-premises, with very little use of the cloud. However, project forward three years and it looks like the current on-premise majority will dwindle to a minority, with private cloud being the biggest gainer.

This finding goes against the wisdom of some analysts who have predicted future defined by utility computing in the public cloud. The disparity may be the result of the arrival of more stringent data protection legislation such as the EU GDPR which mitigates against keeping sensitive data in the public cloud.

In fact most experts agree that the picture for the foreseeable future is some sort of mix and match between public, private, co-located and on-premises. The ideal, as described by the term hybrid cloud, is for these platforms to be seamlessly linked, allowing for scalability together with the all-important compliance and control. However, a true hybrid cloud setup can be tricky in practice as it requires consistency across environments, so some kind of half-way house solution is a more accurate description in most organisations.

When it comes to the type of cloud services people are using, it is no surprise that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) came top. What is surprising, however, is that the figure of around two-thirds of cloud users taking this route is not anticipated to grow.

"I think we are at saturation point with SaaS," said the director of cloud and infrastructure services at a technology firm.

"Services can be quite expensive. People are looking to disassemble their own internal infrastructure so they are looking at IaaS, and with the right contracts they are coming in at quite a reasonable cost over a period of time."

In the meantime, PaaS is popular with the increasing number of firms developing their own software, and IaaS is being boosted by the arrival of 'serverless' architecture such as Amazon Lambda.

Conclusion: Cloud will soon be the default way that most software is deployed.

Further reading: Computing Cloud & Infrastructure Review 2016

Seven important research findings and what they tell us about the industry in 2016

Computing research lifts the lid on cloud, DevOps, data science and IT buying patterns

When is a deal lost and why?

Vendors and resellers tend to believe that they are in with a good chance of a deal right up to the time when buyers make their final choice. However, buyers have generally made up their mind way before this stage. Just over a fifth (21 per cent) of buyers said that sellers will be most likely excluded at the second stage (matching solutions to need), meaning that they will not even get the chance to demonstrate their offerings.

The top three reasons that buyers gave for rejecting a proposal were cost (52 per cent), solutions not matching need (50 per cent) and lack of understanding of customer business and needs (eight per cent). Sellers, meanwhile think they are excluded on the basis of cost (53 per cent), continued use of incumbent (46 per cent), and no perceived value (10 per cent).

There is a big discrepancy here: only seven per cent of buyers suggested that 'continued use of an incumbent' was the most likely reason that a seller would be excluded from the procurement process. This suggests that sellers are attaching too much to the significance to incumbency.

The ability to research and try out solutions in the cloud has changed the game. Loyalty to an incumbent carries less weight than it once did, meaning that IT vendors need to make sure they ensure they remain front of mind and are always willing to pitch in to help potential customers.

Conclusion: in the age of cloud and on-demand customers are increasingly doing research and trying out solutions before contacting a reseller.

Further reading: Buying and Selling Enterprise Technology in the era of Cloud and Digital Transformation