Enterprise Opportunities & Challenges in 2009 - Page 2

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The growing security threat

Security will become paramount. Various experts say the number of cyber attacks is on the rise, and it's not just phishing or malware, hackers might become bold and powerful enough to target countries' critical infrastructures.

Already, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a bipartisan think tank, has called on the Obama administration to revamp America's approach to homeland security.

One good thing to come out of this is that security experts and security professionals alike are urging the incoming president to be mindful of civil liberties and privacy while enhancing security.

Look for malware authors to launch even more sophisticated and complex attacks that are more difficult to detect and stop. The worms themselves will become more sophisticated, incorporating the ability to use the SSL (Secure Socket Layer) and other security capabilities so they appear to network servers as encrypted messages, getting a free pass into the system.

Enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 technologies like social networking and collaboration, may also increase the security threat.

It's all about knowledge

As corporations seek to do more with less, they will push more knowledge to front line workers so they can make better decisions. The idea behind this is not new - back in the early 90s, we had knowledge management and knowledge bases that knowledge workers could access and we saw the rise of the data warehouse.

The idea is to provide more business intelligence (BI) to the front line. More recently, a new breed of BI products has emerged, and we have seen widgets that knowledge workers can put on their desktops, and the incorporation of Web 2.0 technologies into BI.

The most important advance for BI in the coming year may well be BI on the desktop. Microsoft plans to offer pervasive BI, with its upcoming Kilimanjaro SQL Server release, and other vendors are expected to follow suit.

The long arm of the law

It's widely expected that there will be lawsuits galore over the crashing and burning of Wall Street. That will boost sales of e-discovery technology as businesses scramble to cope with discovery motions and court orders.

E-discovery is the process of electronically looking through and finding documents and data for use as evidence in court cases. IBM recently unveiled a proactive e-discovery solution, and several other vendors plan to make plays in this field.

Generally, e-discovery solutions seek ways to structure and tag electronic data and files so that they can be found as quickly and easily as possible, reducing the costs of doing so. Look for this area to become very hot in 2009.