As we look back over the past year, we see some technologies that finally made their way into the market. So, let’s take a moment to reflect on all that we have seen in 2017 and try to select 5 Technology Challenges for 2018.

Please give your input, and … have a wonderful new year!

1. Privacy.

With IoT but also with our smartphones we are more and more uploading a great amount of our personal information to the public cloud. But how can we protect our privacy from hackers or even enterprises that want to share and benefit from it?

2 Automation

As everything gets connected (see IoT), minimizing the effort, cost and time needed to set up, roll out and update our devices  becomes very important. This can only be achieved through automation.

3 Programmability

Software Defined architectures and implementations are becoming more and more important, as the automation challenge will require the devices and networks to be fully programmable – to minimize costs.

4 Cloud Interoperability

As the cloud becomes a commodity (or a necessity?) it is not practical anymore to have isolated cloud islands. Data need to be able to move transparently across clouds, to serve multiple applications.

5 High(er) performance hardware

The introduction of multiple performance intensive applications (virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, machine learning), is creating another CPU/GPU race for manufacturers. Although in recent years hardware capability seemed for the first time to exceeded software performance requirements, at least for the majority of applications, this is changing again.