Years are marked in highs and lows, memories made in good times and in bad, but also in personal growth and achievement. As a popular Broadway musical asks, “How do you measure, measure a year? In daylights, in sunsets, in cups of coffee, in inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife? In five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes. How do you measure a year in the life?”
Big data has been an IT buzzword for years, but what does it really mean? The simplest definition is perhaps that it encompasses the concepts and practices related to dealing with information at vast scale. Think of what it is like to manage a database of insurance information or a collection of electronic health records: The scope of such tasks requires expertise with combing through large data sets, as well as familiarity with specific technical tools such as Apache Hadoop and Amazon Web Services.
Cybersecurity certifications are basically evergreen investments in technical expertise and knowledge. The scope of security-related challenges has greatly expanded in recent years as IT organizations have integrated mobile devices, cloud-connected applications and support for the Internet of Things into their day-to-day operations.
Indeed, the recent RSA Security conference in San Francisco illustrated how significant cybersecurity issues have become for today's enterprises. The show set a record for number of vendors and total attendance, with 43,000 professionals present, and yet there was no clear consensus on which problems were high-priority, nor on which specific tools were best suited to solving them.
The Internet of Things is one of the biggest opportunities in the history of computing. According to Business Insider Intelligence, there could be 34 billion devices connected to the internet by 2020, up from only 10 billion in 2015. Nearly $6 trillion might be spent on IoT solutions between 2016 and 2021, with businesses, government organizations and consumers all investing heavily in the hardware and software that enables new connections and services to thrive.
Network virtualization is rapidly becoming a priority for service providers such as mobile operators and home ISPs. According to a report from SNS Research, their investments in software-defined networking and network functions virtualization - the two building blocks of network virtualization - are expected to expand at a 46 percent compound annual growth rate between 2016 and 2020. These additional dollars will go toward upgrades to content delivery networks, customer premise equipment and other key infrastructures.