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Seven Of The Most Important Technology Trends To Watch This Year

Forbes Technology Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Forbes Technology Council

From advances in cybersecurity to the evolution of machine learning, technology continues to change at a rapid clip. For business leaders, it's critical to understand how such changes lead to opportunity (or potential insecurity).

Here, seven leading technology executives from Forbes Technology Council offer their insights into the most important trends of 2016 and how they could impact the way you do business.

Clockwise from top left: Thomas Griffin, Ashley Saddul, Bradley Burke, Gurpreet Singh, Nicholas Thompson, Simon Crosby, Neill Feather. All photos courtesy of the individual members.

1. The Proliferation of Microservices

More and more startups are focused on creating a standalone microservice that fits within a complicated enterprise architecture (eg. Codeship, Intercom, Slack). This solidarity forges a much better and cheaper product than an internal team building the same. The microservices migration will displace a lot of technology workers, as it will take much fewer people to manage the same amount of tech. – Nicholas ThompsonGrit

2. Software Authenticity

Cybercriminals use fake software and websites on mobile and open source systems to hack into your networks. To stay protected, businesses need to be on top of software authenticity. Cybercriminals are constantly evolving, and fake software is just one of their latest tools taking advantage of open source collaboration, mimicking popular mobile apps to steal personal information. – Neill Feather, SiteLock

3. The Information of Things

Smart devices are also educators that make everything else smarter by unlocking data that's been trapped in our devices all along. The smart home unlocks data about our lifestyles, Waze turns our driving habits into traffic data, personal data teaches us about our health habits and needs. Now, the challenge for startups will be to access and make use of relevant data from these new sources. – Gurpreet SinghTalkLocal

4. Being Proactive Instead of Reactive

Despite vendor claims, detection of cyber threats can’t protect you, and it isn’t advancing much even when it's disguised as artificial intelligence (AI). Instead of relying on post-hoc analysis in the hope of spotting a breach, your focus in 2016 should be on adopting solutions that make your infrastructure more secure by design, to prevent a breach before it starts. For instance, adopting micro-segmentation and micro-virtualization. –Simon CrosbyBromium Inc.

5. Machine Learning

With Google recently open sourcing their proprietary machine learning algorithm (TensorFlow), I believe we will see this industry erupt with new innovations. Prior to their announcement, machine learning knowledge had been kept largely within companies and research teams. With these algorithms available to the public, machine learning will quickly evolve and improve as a mainstream technology. – Thomas GriffinOptinMonster

6. Bots Being Used Everywhere

Bots are software applications that run automated tasks. This year will see a plethora of bots that we can use and program ourselves. They will have conversations with us, track our to-do list and schedule our meetings. More sophisticated bots will be able to manage our stock holdings, fetch news stories that we care about, or even keep track of the job market and apply to that dream job on our behalf. – Ashley SaddulRecruiter.com

7. Evolution of Cloud Big Data Capabilities

The cloud has been an interesting place to deploy components of our platform. However, with recent advancements -- particularly in the Google cloud offerings -- we are seeing the possibility of reducing components of our big data architecture that we have held in-house. I really wonder if the bubble around companies like cloudera, mapR, pivotal, etc. will pop in 2016. – Bradley BurkeNetworked Insights