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Daisie RegisterJanuary 23 20142 min read

Four Top Federal IT Trends in 2014

As a part of our ongoing series of looking at the top federal IT trends that will impact federal agencies in 2014, we asked our partners at NetApp to chime in. Lee Vorthman, CTO, Federal Civilian Agencies, NetApp U.S. Public Sector, looks at the indicators of technologies that will make the most impact this year for the federal government. Read his full post:

With 2013 behind us, and as we look into the New Year, we are already beginning to see indicators of what technology will make the most impact in 2014 for the federal government. Conversations with customers and peers helped me to predict the following four trends I see making a big impact in the year ahead:

1. Flash – Increased players in flash will drive down the cost for customers, offering faster data access, less heat, and less power consumption. However, I predict it will still take another 18 – 36 months for most enterprise applications to adapt to the nuances of how flash reads and writes data.

Flash adoption is also being driven by a subtle increase in the cost of compute. As compute costs plateau or increase, customers will no longer be able to afford to nonchalantly throw compute at problems. Flash will play an increased role by helping to decrease the amount of data that is moved around networks, keeping it close to compute where it is needed and decreasing latency to improve data access and even analytics. In the next 18 months, I expect to see some really interesting technologies announced by the top flash players in order to capitalize on the performance benefits of flash. On the other hand, I also expect we will begin to see consolidation of the flash market as flash storage gets more competitive and the smaller players look for one of the few remaining exits.

2. Cloud – Customers will continue to move toward the cloud to realize the cost savings and data efficiencies of converged architectures. However, as more and more customers move to the cloud, data portability and management will become an increasing priority. Heavy cloud adopters will want increased data portability in order to take advantage of different features of the top hyperscaler cloud providers, and new cloud adopters will look for data portability to decrease risk and minimize lock in.

3. Analytics – Analytics will continue to be a hot topic as customers attempt to extract value from their data. Within the large field of analytics, a hot topic area for 2014 will be cyber analytics. Over the course of 2013 the industry has realized that monitoring and defending their networks requires analysis of large volumes of data. I am already beginning to see job postings for Cyber Analyst positions and I expect to see a cross-pollination of cyber analytics with other heavy analytics fields such as retail, healthcare, and science.

4. OpenStack and Open Source – Organizations will continue to utilize virtualization to get greater efficiency out of their compute infrastructure; however, as the tremors of the government shutdown continue to dissipate, customers are being cautious with their budgets and therefore will look more toward open source. As customers look to expand or renew existing hypervisor infrastructures, I expect organizations to look toward OpenStack to realize cost savings and to preserve data portability as they look towards other key initiatives like cloud, analytics, or cyber.

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