TRENDING
Mark Walker is Associate Vice President, Sub-Saharan Africa at IDC.
Jon Tullett is Research Manager for IT services at IDC South Africa.
George Kalebaila is Senior Research Manager for Telecom at IDC South Africa. critical workloads, as well as integration and management. They should also reevaluate contracts and relationships with software providers to ensure that they meet their business requirements.
IDC pointed out that 2016 was also a tough year for information security, with the prevalence of massive data leaks, ransomware, and IoT malware compounded by a shortage of IT security skills.
“ We believe 2017 will be worse in every aspect of information security,” says Tullett.“ We expect continued exposure for South African businesses to major cybercrime syndicates, both directly and indirectly.”
IDC also believes 2017 will see at least one high-profile public breach in South Africa, which is likely to be a data leak within the public sector, although it cannot rule out malware or ransomware attack in retail or healthcare.
However, IDC expects that South Africa will contribute several new technologies aimed thwarting attacks, particularly in relation to IoT applications.
George Kalebaila, Senior Research Manager for Telecommunications at IDC South Africa, says until now most of the IoT applications have been cellular based and mainly under the domain of traditional mobile operators.“ In 2017, we will start seeing several smaller nonmobile operators deploy low-power WAN IoT networks to provide low-cost IoT applications.”
IDC expects that most of these implementations will be LoRA based rather than SigFox. IoT will remain a preserve of mobile operators. Post 2017, IDC expects to see an acceleration of IoT deployments in other African countries using similar business models.
LPWAN IoT network implementations will slowly start pushing IoT into the limelight away from traditional M2M applications and lower the barrier to entry in the market, reduce the cost of connectivity, and contribute to the rapid growth of connected devices.
IDC also forecasts the developer community taking more interest in developing localised IoT solutions. Once these solutions find their way into the market, this will also drive IoT adoption.
Kalebaila says mobility is becoming one of the key drivers of digital transformation as customer engagements and transactions move to digital platforms.
Financial services will continue to lead the adoption of mobility solutions mainly due to the inherent benefits and cost savings from the reduction in branch footprint and improving customer experience. However, securing data and data recovery have become more important than securing devices as data becomes the new capital in the digital economy.
“ In 2017, near field communication will start pushing mobile payments to the fore, but will still remain on the peripheral and will be niche,” says Kalebaila.“ 5G curiosity and hype from mobile operators and vendors will lead to 5G becoming part of enterprise executive discussions.”
Organisations should plan for mobile applications as a natural part of all workflows in the organisation. The focus should move to mobile application development platforms as a critical tool and security must be integrated across the mobile application development lifecycle. Organisations should also develop an intermediate understanding of 5G elements and what they mean in a commercial setting.
Tullett believes that South African companies will increase their investment in analytics and big data in 2017. While the primary investment will remain limited to large enterprises, he says South African companies are building foundation technologies for cognitive computing, whether it is part of the long-term strategy or not.
Behavioral analysis and prediction will become mainstream in 2017, directly driving product development in banking, financial services, and insurance in particular. In 2017, analytics will be the primary resource responsible for thwarting major criminal incidents.
When machine learning does arrive in the country, it will do so rapidly, with mature, proven technologies ready to deploy by then and ready to take advantage of aligning projects towards that future. Tullett’ s advice to organisations in South Africa is to continue to invest in analytics and data processing capabilities. www. intelligentcio. com INTELLIGENTCIO
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