2015 Trends and Predictions

December is upon us. While most of the world celebrates the holiday season, IT professionals like you are largely working around the clock to take care of critical updates to your IT infrastructure. If you find yourself with some downtime waiting for your systems to provide the needed updates, take a few minutes to research some of the trends you may face in the coming year.

To get you started, here’s a look at our top predictions for 2015.

Organized Hacking Will Increase

In 2014 we seemed to see more protests, a rise in political organizations and coups, and more organized groups that dissent with governments, cultures and ideals. This unrest will lead to an increase in organized hacking targeting corporations, governments and others in the New Year. Some of these organized hacking groups, or hacktivists, may combine with others to become a stronger hacking network.

Hacktivists will use a combination of social engineering, scripts, vulnerabilities, DDoS and brute force in their attempt to access sensitive and valuable data and information. They will then use that information to exploit others as has been done in the past. Mobile and cloud devices will be top on their target list.

Mobile and Cloud Computing Will Continue To Converge

Due to the rise of mobile devices and an increase in mobile applications in the enterprise, there will continue to be a convergence of mobile and cloud computing. While there will be some complexity with enterprise adoption and the consumerization of IT, many organization will adopt a centralized approach to mobile and cloud computing, providing their employees, partners and customers with unprecedented access to information. New corporate applications will need to be created to address data portability requirements of the users. Because of this, API gateway and management platforms will see growth and adoption as organizations seek to provide secure methods to authenticate, authorize and audit access to data across devices. This in turn will lead to new revenue streams for organizations, but require new mobile device management capabilities.

Enterprise Application Architectures Will Be Adopted

To address the growth of cloud computing and the so-called “mobile-first strategy” in the enterprise, a new application development architecture will be adopted by many organizations. As part of this adoption, an API gateway strategy will be created as part of the application architecture. These will help to address the increase of Web APIs that provide access and authentication to enterprise data. Much of this will be built upon RESTful web services, which may lead to new vulnerabilities.

New Vulnerabilities Will Be Identified

In 2013, 727 vulnerabilities in the most popular web browsers were identified, which was down from the 893 identified in the prior year. While 2014 data is not yet available, it appears to be one of the worst years in terms of impact of the vulnerabilities found. For example, HeartBleed, which affected OpenSSL, was identified and became known as one of the most devastating vulnerabilities in the past decade. Celebgate, caused by an iTunes vulnerability cause much embarrassment for celebrities and others. We will see this trend continue and 2015 will see an increase in both the number and impact of vulnerabilities.

API-Driven Development Will Increase

Gartner also lists this as one of their top ten trends for 2015. Cloud and mobile APIs are an essential part of a mobile-first environment, and as such new applications will revolve around API integration. Developers will need to build this into the scope of projects. The mobile API development platform and MBaaS space will see some consolidation as new cloud API development companies increase. Both web and server-side apps will increase in number and companies will look for platforms and solutions that provide safe, secure API access to sensitive corporate data. These solutions’ auditing and reporting capabilities will improve and increase exponentially making it easier for identity and security professionals to reduce risk. Thousands of new applications accessing corporate data of the enterprise will be created.

If you have a few more minutes to spare while your systems update, we would love to hear your thoughts. What trends do you see in 2015?