2017 was a test of business resilience. While cyberattacks and natural disasters devastated some businesses, many others kept their operations running without disruption. Advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning and blockchain technology, among others, began helping more businesses eliminate inefficiencies, human error and downtime. What will 2018 hold? We tapped our industry experts for their predictions on what IT trends they’re watching this year. We asked how cyber security will evolve, what emerging technologies will take hold (and which ones are over-hyped), what mistakes companies may be making, and what all this means for the coming year. Here’s what the experts said.

1. 2017 tested businesses’ resilience with crippling cyber attacks and natural
disasters, while major advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning
and blockchain made their mark. So, what can we expect for 2018?
The experts have spoken:
Here are the top IT trends for 2018.
Enterprise Technology Trends
for 2018 and Beyond

2. 2017 tested businesses’ resilience with crippling cyber attacks and
natural disasters, while major advances in AI, machine learning and
blockchain made their mark. So, what can we expect for 2018?
The experts have spoken: Here are the top IT trends for 2018.
“Two years ago, Gartner began telling companies to adopt public-cloud-first
strategies, and many CIOs are now doing just that. Public cloud is past the initial
hype, and broad-based adoption is picking up and will continue to accelerate over
the next two years. CIOs are driven by a desire to create applications that rapidly
make a difference to their end users. They want to take advantage of innovations
in the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI) and more. CIOs
are using the public cloud as a new platform for building their applications, which is
the best way for them to deliver value to their customers.”
– Josh Crowe, CTO

3. “The IT security talent gap will continue to be a top vulnerability for organizations.
Considering 40 percent of respondents to our recent survey believed their
organizations’ leadership would hold IT teams accountable in the event of a
cyberattack or breach, businesses are going to have to find a way to do more with
their available resources. In 2018, behavioral analytics and artificial intelligence
(AI) will have the biggest impact on how businesses operate, as I anticipate more
security vendors will integrate AI into their products to improve prevention and
detection capabilities, and more companies will look to leverage automated
security products to alleviate the lack of human resources, skill levels and time.”
– Shawn Burke, Global CSO

4. “As the use and prevalence of IoT technology continues to grow in 2018, we can
expect to see larger botnets behind denial-of-service attacks. Big name corporations
will continue to be targets of cyberattacks, and they know it—about 46 percent of
respondents said in a recent survey that they were putting off new IoT deployments
because of it. But it’s unlikely these companies will make greater efforts in their
security than they have in the past. In the same survey, 43 percent said their
organization had suffered a cyberattack, hack or breach in the last 2 months. I’m
worried some corporations are seeing cyberattacks as the new normal.”
– Asher de Metz, Security Consulting Senior Manager

5. “Security has been a ‘side order’ or afterthought for many years. It’s finally becoming
an ingredient in the ‘main dish.’ With more and more data living outside the
corporate walls and the use of compute technologies like containers and serverless,
companies will be required to invest in new tools to protect their data assets.”
– Todd Loeppke, Lead CTO Architect

6. “The next ‘big technologies’ are already here – artificial intelligence, machine
learning, IoT, 3D printing, nanotechnology, blockchain, and augmented and
virtual reality. It’s the underlying structures associated with these and the ongoing
improvements in each of these areas that will lead to further leaps forward.
Blockchain is still in its infancy and there is so much more to do in this space in
order to have widespread use. In 2018, there will continue to be evolution with each
of these technologies, but it will take longer to see the impacts with blockchain
than with the other technologies.”
– Sue Clark, Senior CTO Architect

7. “In the next 5 years, the conversation around the physical location of data will
blur into the background as blockchain technologies become more prevalent and
powerful than traditional privacy and encryption technologies. We’ll be able to put
data and processing anywhere and they won’t be any less secure than they are now.
This will usher in more real-time use of information and artificial intelligence, and
allow us to shift our focus from the process to the outcomes.”
– Miki Sandorfi, SVP, Product Engineering

8. “Machine learning (ML) will continue to be an area of focus for enterprises, and
will start to dramatically change business processes in almost all industries.
However, many companies will face the challenge of embracing and implementing
ML technology within their lines of business. In 2018, more new and easy-to-use
toolkits, libraries, and frameworks will be released that will enable the technology
to expand into new use cases and create new levels of products.”
– Alex Ough, CTO Architect

9. “As the amount of data created by IoT devices grows exponentially, enterprises will
look to hire dedicated IT talent who can analyze the data and provide additional
services based on this new data source. The use of chatbots will also accelerate
due to the advancement in artificial intelligence and machine learning.”
– Todd Loeppke, Lead CTO Architect

10. “Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are showing a
resurgence. While it’s difficult to predict whether these will take off in 2018 or need
longer to mature, there is no doubt they’ll start to become more mainstream and
impact areas from predictive analytics to autonomous vehicles.”
– Joseph George, VP, Product Management

11. “Containers won’t drive digital transformation in 2018; serverless will. Companies
will continue to use containers to set up and run microservices, but the larger focus
will be on developing applications on serverless frameworks, which reduces the
amount of infrastructure that must be managed.”
– Meg Ramsey, VP, Cloud Services Product Management