Today is the first day of a new calendar year. I'm hoping most of you have the day off, and I certainly do, but I wanted to ring in the new year with a look forward. What will happen in 2013? I think it's incredibly hard to predict, but I'll take a chance and make a few predictions.
Mobile devices will continue to grow in popularity. No great surprise there for many of you, but I think that we will see more smartphones sold than regular phones in 2013. With a large market of used devices and the constant push of new devices, new form factors and sizes, I truly think that we will be in a very data centric world most for most of the time in 2013. Between tablets and laptops sporting cellular connections and pocket sized smartphones, most of us (including non-technical people) will have some type of data consumption device in our lives.
What does this mean for data professionals? I don't think it matters which platform sells the most phones because all of them will be looking for more data-drive applications. Whether these are apps, HTML5 websites, or something new, all of us that manage data will have to deal with more and more mobile delivery of information in 2013. That means security, especially XSS and injection attacks, will be more of a concern. Good backups, warm copies of data in the event of vandalism, and comprehensive auditing will be something we need to focus on implementing.
I think we'll continue to see more and more BYOD at work, though with the nature of security being what it is and constant data loss, there will be a push to work through more virtual interfaces like RDP. It won't succeed and we'll have more data breeches in 2013, including some big ones as Verizon as predicted. Encryption will become a bigger battle in 2013, with more companies asking for personal devices to implement encryption. I'm not hopeful that this will become the norm
Lastly, I'll predict that we see a change for SQL Server. I think that some of our instances will move away from SAN storage pools and move to dedicated SANs or perhaps back to local storage. We will get more SSD storage implemented in new system, perhaps the standard becoming 2-4 SSDs for new hardware. I think flash is here to stay, at least until high speed optical storage becomes economical.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
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