Compliance will come of age in 2010
(30/12/2009)

Nick Garlick, Managing Director, Nebulas Solutions Group, looks ahead at the IT Security Landscape in 2010

Compliance Comes of Age

2010 will see compliance finally being "hard wired" into organisations, as more adopt the standards and implement best practices. The resources and investments made in compliance will start to bear fruit; the grudging acceptance of the need for compliance will be replaced with a growing acceptance that compliance benefits most companies.

Advent of New Firewall Technology

Firewalls have remained pretty much unaltered for the past 15 years, but this will change dramatically in 2010 with the arrival of a new solution from Palo Alto Networks. This is completely new firewall technology that allows IT departments to identify which application is being accessed by which user. Such granularity, ease of use and its minimal impact on network performance is light years ahead of any other firewall currently available. It will make IT departments’ firewall monitoring workload far less and provide much more detailed information about threats. It will provide major competition to established vendors such as BlueCoat and Check Point in 2010.

Channel Consolidation & Growth

This looks set to continue, but at a faster pace and with larger organisations coming together. 2010 will see the channel taking on a far great role as integrators for complex IT infrastructures, which have become so complex that a single vendor cannot meet all their requirements. Resellers offering multiple vendors' solutions and those who can integrate them effectively will grow rapidly in the coming year.

Large Vendors Will Acquire Specialists

2009 combined a major recession and the rapid emergence of Web 2.0. These two events caused a massive shift in the IT landscape – companies are being asked to do more with less resource, be more agile and consolidation has meant that new businesses are emerging more rapidly than ever. The speed of the change and its continuation has left large organisations struggling to keep pace with more agile, smaller competitors. As a result, 2010, will see many, many more acquisitions – large vendors acquiring small specialists for their skills, knowledge and market share.

Hybrid Clouds will Dominate

Despite much hype about Cloud Computing, it's still an immature technology. 2010 will see dramatic growth in organisations using Clouds, but few will move wholesale to a “Public Cloud” model. It's still too unproven and there are some major security concerns. The Hybrid Cloud will dominate in 2010 – non-critical apps will go to the Public Cloud for cost and efficiency reasons, but most organisations will still keep their critical business apps in-house. The challenge for 2010 will be seamlessly and securely integrating the two activities.

Increased Spending on Cost Efficiencies

Doing more with less resource will be key in 2010. Virtualisation and server consolidation began this process in earnest during 2009, but there still a long way to go: around 60% of all server consolidation projects are still in the lab and haven't yet made it to production. This will change in 2010, as part of the drive to do more with less. 2009 was a planning year for many organisations, but 2010 will see increased spending mainly on technologies that deliver cost savings. Virtualisation, acceleration and Cloud will see increases in spending, but only to achieve savings in the longer term.

2010: IT Consolidation – No Holes Barred

Most organisations used 2009 as an opportunity to take stock whilst IT budgets were being withheld. They also used the time to pinpoint any areas of possible IT consolidation where greater efficiencies could be made – no holes barred! 2010 will see very much a ‘spend to save’ mentality with those new projects and initiatives getting the go ahead that will deliver fast ROI and significant reduction on TCO.