Cisco on IT industry trends

US network equipment manufacturer Cisco has made a forecast on trends that are visible now and will evolve in the IT industry and high technologies in the coming years.

The company expects growth of Internet traffic, the accelerated pace of digitalization, new demands on the IT infrastructure due to the change of behavior in the business world, more points of development of artificial intelligence and cloud computing.

According to Cisco’s forecast for 2020, the volume of web traffic globally will increase 95-fold compared to 2005 due to growth in the number of Internet users (up to 4.1 billion) and network-connected devices, as well as increasing broadband speeds and video transmission volumes. After three years, 71% of web traffic will come from the PC, mobile devices and TVs.

To prepare for the era of digital networks to Cisco analysts recommend organizations to use controller-based automation solutions, contextual and operational analytics, virtualization of network functions (NFV) and unlimited scalability of the cloud.

Methods of doing business change, which generates the need for the rapid deployment of services and applications, reducing costs and high level of security.

This, in turn, leads to the emergence of such requirements to IT infrastructure as a reduction in the load on IT staff, increase the efficiency of IT resources, automation and orchestration of services.

According to the Cisco, automatization of the detection and elimination of threats can be achieved through using the possibilities of artificial intelligence, capable of continuous study based on analysis of huge amounts of data. Cisco itself uses artificial intelligence to create a Self-Defending Network, which automatically detects potential threats and respond to them.

Another forecast for Cisco is to change behaviours in business. The new generation of collaboration tools will be based on cloud technology, mobile communication and technological processes that are open to integration.

Additionally, Cisco predicts increased use of the so-called cloud computing in 2017.

Cloud computing will find further use in projects of "smart" cities and "smart" power distribution.