Gartner has a bleak outlook for the IT sector to the end of the decade.
The research group says it expects three-in-four enterprises will be infected with ‘undetected, financially motivated, targeted malware that evaded their traditional perimeter and host defenses’. This, it says, is down to the wide availability of DIY malware kits, allowing even the technically ungifted access to the weapons of virus writers.
It expects enterprises to waste in the region of $100 billion over the next five years investing in networking technologies and services that are no longer relevant for today’s best practice network designs.
As enterprises buy in more processor-dense kit to handle the increasing load being put on data centers, Gartner predicts power and cooling issues will dog half of them.
It expects the cost of PCs to drop by half as the market is commoditised, with the main selling points for PCs in the future being robustness and manageability. Vista, it says, will be the last of major release for Windows, with progress on Microsoft’s flagship operating system being delivered in a modular fashion, rather than ‘monolithic deployments’. It claims this will shift the focus towards improving overall quality.
Mobile phones will become ‘trackable’ as location-based mobile services are rolled out. Calls for national safety and civil protection, and marketing initiatives aimed at encouraging users to trade off privacy levels in return for other benefits will mean third parties will be able to track phone users, despite privacy concerns,.
It also looks like Web 2.0 may quickly fizzle out, with user-generated content peaking early next year at 100 million. Gartner says that ex-bloggers already number 200 million and that growth rates, average life-span of blogs and other factors mean the phenomenon is already nearing its zenith.
For the full release, visit the Gartner site.
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