Latest Trends free essay sample

Information Technology (IT) is enriched with opportunities and has become one of the most well known industries for never ending change. For anyone working with or involved in IT today the pace at which technology changes is frighteningly fast. A technology that is leveraged today could be completely outdated in only a few years. The ability to quickly learn and adapt to these new technologies will provide both individuals and companies with the ability to succeed. Failure to maintain the pace of new technology as it evolves will simply provide an opening for other competitor to embrace this new technology before you. Information Technology Virtualization One of the newest trends in IT is the use of virtualization. Before the advent of virtualization companies would spend considerable amounts of money on individual servers with which they used to both store information and run their applications. Each of these servers came at what might appear to be a relatively affordable upfront cost but the ongoing cost of maintaining those servers including power and people to manage and repair them resulted in a significant cost for all companies. We will write a custom essay sample on Latest Trends or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page A better way to manage these servers was developed with the ability to take a single server and virtualized it into a number of logical servers each appearing to the user as a single computer. This eliminated the need for individual servers for every project in the organization and provided a method by which one server could meet the needs of many different groups within the organization (Search CIO. com. , n. d. ). The beauty of this approach is that to the technology teams these servers appear as a server dedicated only to them. Because servers aren’t used at 100% utilization at all times the ability to virtualize saves cost and provides ample computing power as needed. These machines can also be expanded and additional memory or storage space allocated for particular clients on that machine that need those resources. The disadvantage to this technology is that there are typically significant startup costs and the organization is dependent upon an outside firm to maintain their presence in the virtual world. Information Technology Outsourcing Another trend in IT is the actual outsourcing of IT services to other organizations. If a company produces a product they may be very good at producing that product but they may not be good at managing an IT infrastructure including servers, hardware and the people necessary to ensure the components all work well together as a strategic advantage for the organization. Because of this many companies have begun to outsource things such as mail servers, application and file servers as well as storage to other organizations that specialize in those particular applications as a way to eliminate or minimize the need for a dedicated IT staff within the organization. If a company can reduce the number of IT staff members and get the same product from an outsourced organization for a significantly lower price than the organization wins as a whole as the company providing the service can do it in a manner that is much more efficient than trying to hire and maintain IT staff. This is known as ITaaS or Information Technology as a Service which is a growing trend used by many organizations especially those that are smaller in size. The drawback to ITaaS is that in many cases the IT organization provides a competitive advantage that is lost when everyone uses the same IT infrastructure. If competitors A B both outsource to the same company then there is little competitive advantage that can be gained. Cloud Technology Finally, the one trend that has completely changed everything about IT and the role it plays to consumers, companies and IT organizations is the cloud. While in the past the focus was on providing individuals with the ability to store their information on ever form of storage possible, such as local computers. There is now a huge demand to take that information and store it somewhere where it is accessible at any time, any place and at a very low cost. This provides the ability for IT organizations to be everywhere at once. No longer does someone who wants to store a document need to store it or transfer it between devices. They can simply save a copy of the document in the cloud and it will be available on any of their devices at any time and the copy is a single copy that doesn’t need to be updated on any other device. Cloud technology may appear to simply move data off servers within an organization to an outside supplier or data center. This is true but in the case of the cloud that information doesn’t necessarily have to be stored for every single occurrence. A great example is something like a song Apple would sell on iTunes. If a million people want to buy a new song and have it available in the cloud Apple doesn’t have to store a million copies like would be in the traditional case. In this particular example they simply store a single copy of that song and then share it with millions of users. The beauty for the customer is that the song is available everywhere, the company gains the advantage of making the song easily accessible and provides a single storage method that reduces the cost for both the company and the end consumer allowing companies to become more profitable. Virtually every organization now supports some of their applications in the cloud as a way to remove the need to store and maintain information locally or in a single physical location. Replication and backup of information stored in the cloud is also a significant advantage as backups can be safely maintained (Balisterieri, T. , n. d. ). For organizations they now too have the ability to rely on other companies to basically house their storage infrastructure in a manner that is available to them at any time and at a much lower cost than they would have if the information was maintained locally. Downsides to the cloud are minimal as currently companies and consumers all want their information available everywhere. The primary concern is around securing the cloud as information is available somewhere other than within the physical confines of the corporate data center. Integrating Cloud Technology Implementing cloud technology within the organization can be accomplished in a number of ways. The first step for most companies is to move email management to a company such as Google to manage email. This eliminates the need for servers to maintain this information as well as the staff necessary to ensure accounts are maintained. The cost of providing email service would in most cases be substantially less than attempting to maintain the infrastructure locally (Balisterieri, T. , n. d. ). In addition to email services comes the need for a form of a document management system. In many cases companies need a way to securely store their proprietary information in a manner that provides access from anywhere but securely. Moving to a product like SharePoint can allow the organization to migrate all of their document storage needs to a cloud based server with integrated security. Finally, the company can work to start moving applications from within their application servers to servers housed at Amazon or other online providers such that again the need for local IT resources is reduced while partnering with a cloud company that can maintain the infrastructure necessary to provide the services needed for the organization. Conclusion The society we live in is an information society, flooded with technology that focuses on communication. Technology uses devices such as the telephone, satellite communication, radio, cellular technology, wireless internet, etc. as a way to connect people not matter where you are located. The emergence of new technology will continue to replace old technology as new innovative ideas continue to shape our world. The key for organizations today is to quickly embrace these new technologies to prepare for future innovations and be competitive in ever changing market.