Accenture Technology Vision 2013

Accenture Technology Vision 2013
Every Business Is a Digital Business
Contents
Contents
Foreword Introduction Relationships at Scale Design for Analytics Data Velocity Seamless Collaboration Software-Dened Networking Active Defense Beyond the Cloud Conclusion Research Methodology End Notes Contacts
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3 4 6 18 32 42 52 63 77 87 90 91 97
Foreword
Foreword
Technology is intertwined in nearly every aspect of business today, with information technology fast becoming a primary driver of market differentiation, business growth, and protability. That is why we believe that understanding the technology trends that are changing the world as we know it extends well beyond the realm of IT executivesto COOs, CMOs, and CEOs. As leaders, it is our collective responsibility to grasp the importance of technology and to use it to deliver tangible business results for our stakeholders. The theme of this years Accenture Technology Vision is Every Business Is a Digital Business, and we see it as a forecast for business, not
merely technology. We describe the important technology trends affecting organizations in both the public and private sectors, and we suggest that these changes signal a broader transformation in the role of technology and in the business models that will be required for success.
consumers, to further differentiate themselves in the marketplace, and to expand their global footprint. We hope that you nd the Accenture Technology Vision insightful as you consider strategies for making your organizations even more relevant in a digital world. We wish you all the best in your journey.
We further propose that the time is now for leaders to act, in terms of understanding the power of new technologies and having the foresight to adopt them. Around the world, we see organizations using the technologies described in the Pierre Nanterme Accenture Technology Vision to adapt Chairman & CEO to a rapidly changing environment, Accenture to transform their relationships with
Marty Cole Group Chief Executive - Technology Accenture
Introduction
Every Business Is a Digital Business

Technology is changing the game
Enterprises have spent the last 25 years working to peel away the nonessential pieces of their businesses; focus on the core, outsource the rest. But in this push to simplify, many companies have relegated IT to keeping the lights on. Without information and technology, a business is blind in todays digital world. You must change the way you think about IT to map a clear path forward. Every business is now a digital business. The world has already changed around us, and IT is driving much of the transformation. IT is a minimum standard for how we effectively run our enterprise, but its gone further than that. IT has become a driving force, in many situations the driving force, for how we effectively grow our companies. Every industry is now software driven; as such, every company must adopt IT as one of its core competencies. By this we mean that software is absolutely integral to how we currently run our businesses as well as how we reimagine our businesses as the world continues to changehow we redesign and produce things, how we create and manage new commercial transactions, how we begin to collaborate at unprecedented levels internally and with customers and suppliers. In the new world, our digital efforts will be the key to how we innovate and expand our business. There is a higher order of thinkinga digital mindsetthat will, we believe, separate tomorrows most able organizations from their lesser rivals. Accenture observes that increasing numbers of farsighted organizations are recognizing IT as a strategic asset with which they can renew vital aspects of their operations optimizing at least and innovating at best. As such, they are investing in the digital tools, the capabilities, and the skills to more easily identify useful data, evaluate it, excerpt it, analyze it, derive insights from it, share it, manage it, comment on it, report on it, and, most importantly, act on it. We no longer have to look far for examples. Here is Nike using wireless sensors and Web technology to create a performance-tracking system that allows it to create new services to monitor, and to improve and create new training routines for athletes. There is Ford, using sensor data to monitor both how a car operates and the drivers behavior, and seeking to apply analytics to improve the experience for the next generation. i These companies, and many more like them, clearly see digital as a strategic imperativea tool of
Introduction
competitive intent. They arent waiting for new technologies to be developed or to mature before they act. Nor should you.
of their toughest problemsand greatest opportunities.
As it has always doneas is its charterour Technology Vision looks The obligation for action is all over the horizon at the emerging the more pressing because the developments in technology that technologies to transform your should be added to the list of business are here and now. They are technologies the enterprise should already good enough. Mobile, cloud, be prepared to take advantage of, social, virtualization, big datamany from data visualization solutions of the items continuously listed as and software-dened networks to hot trendsare quickly becoming moving-target-defense security part of the current generation of systems. Just as importantly, though, technology; they are well past the this years report communicates why point where they should be areas every organization has to adopt a of exploration and experimentation digital mindset. At the very least, it and are quickly becoming the tools is necessary in order to anticipate with which companies can craft fast, and respond to ongoing technologycost-effective solutions to some driven disruptions. Amazon.com
has disrupted retail sectors far beyond books and changed the whole discussion about who owns IT. Similarly, Airbnb is sparking a transformation in the traditional hotel business. But ideally, a digital mindset will enable enterprises to launch preemptive strikes of their own. It is incumbent upon the executive leadership team to be stewards of this new mindset. They must recognize that its no longer possible to separate the technology from the business; the two are too tightly intertwined. IT helps redesign the companys products and supports its processes; it drives its supply chains; it becomes part
of the products themselves and creates new ones; it allows access to new consumers; it provides the frameworks to create net new services. An organization cannot be the best in its sector unless it excels at understanding and using technology. Your stakeholders may not yet be probing into how your top team views IT. But it wont be long before they do.
Relationships at Scale Moving beyond transactions to digital relationships
Trend 1. Relationships at Scale
Relationships at Scale
Businesses need to rethink their digital strategies to move beyond e-commerce and marketing. Although mobile technology, social networks, and context-based services have increased the number of digital connections with consumers, most companies are still just creating more detailed views of consumers, consumer attributes, and transactions. Individually, these connections may represent new types of user experiences, even new sets of sales channelsbut thats not the real opportunity. Taken in aggregate, digital represents a key new approach to consumer engagement and loyalty: companies can manage relationships with consumers at scale.
It is time for businesses to return their attention to their relationships with consumers. Business success has always been built on relationships and on the relevance of products and services to buyers needs. Just a few generations ago, consumers were often friendsand certainly neighborsof the local grocer, pharmacist, and everyone else who provided the things consumers needed. But that model changed with large-scale industrialization and with the introduction of IT. Handcraftsmanship was replaced by mass production. Advice delivered over the counter was replaced by global call centers. A human face making a sale was often replaced by a Web page. That might imply that a growing distance between companies and consumers is inevitableand over the last few decades, many consumers might agree that they have been
treated with greater indifference and far less personal attention. Yet now, the opposite is true: technology is nally at a point where buyers can be treated like individuals again. Consumers are more than faceless digital transactions, more than a cookie le or a transaction history or a demographic prole; theyre real people with real differences. Companies now have rich channels through which to communicate with consumers in a much more personal way. Farsighted organizations are seeing a golden opportunity to use mobile communications channels, social media, and context-based services to create truly personal relationships with consumersbut digital relationships this timeand to leverage those relationships to drive revenue growth.
Specically, enterprises are customizing the experience for every interaction they have with consumers regardless of the channel. This mass personalization includes not only the interactions that companies have with consumers but the interactions that consumers have with each other. The potential payoff is two-pronged: a relationship with the consumer your competitors dont have and a differentiated brand.
are more than faceless digital Consumers transactions, more than a cookie le or a transaction history or a demographic prole; theyre real people with real differences.
Learning more than ever before

Businesses now have new ways to learn about consumers based on increasingly digital interactions, whether through e-mail, social media, Web pages, online chat, mobile apps, or tweets. And its not just online interactions that benet
from those insights; by maintaining integrated communications across both physical and virtual channels, enterprises can use insight from digital channels to improve service in in-store situations as well. For instance, Catalina, a global marketing company, is using consumers in-store location, determined by the product QR codes they scan, along with consumers proles to generate offers as they shop for groceries.i With the understanding of exactly where
shoppers are in the store, offers can be personalized in such a way to provide not just a digital offer but an offer that is relevant to what shoppers are looking at in the physical store at that moment. These digital interactions allow companies to capture, measure, analyze, and exploit social interactions in new ways. By simply being digital in nature, the interactions allow enterprises to actually measure the results of
their sales and marketing efforts, past transactions to inform current scaling them when they succeed and conversations, using context to move scotching them when they fail. from transactions to interactions, and ultimately using their consumer Using analytics can also establish insight to infuse the interactions deeper consumer insights, with greater engagement and allowing companies to create more intimacy. compelling user experiences. This concept of mass personalization enables businesses to customize every interaction. Essentially, they can begin to establish a relationship with consumers, using
Consumers arent just buyers any longer

Key to making this transition is understanding that consumers arent just buyers anymoretheyve evolved into connected consumers. Theyre connected to social networks. Theyre connected to like-minded consumers. Theyre connected to brands. That means they also have the potential to be your advertisers. Thats a powerful constituency to tap into. Thanks to social media, consumers have more opportunities than ever before to express likes, dislikes, and recommendations. They arent simply purchasing a product or service they are doing a lot more. On Yelp, theyre detractors or cheerleaders. On delivery.com and Menuism, theyre reviewers and advertisers. On Spotify, theyre DJs offering music recommendations. On TripAdvisor,
theyre travel guides. And, thanks to mobility, they can do it where they want, when they want. The Cleveland Indians, a Major League baseball team, is actively working to use its relationships with its most avid fans to create a group of evangelists to promote the ii team. The Indians Social Media Club incents fans to create a buzz about the team through a myriad of social channels, from Facebook to Tumblr. More than just pointing fans to social forums, they are actively incenting them to participate, offering ticket discounts and, for active posters, chances to be invited to a special Social Suite in the ballpark and to share their comments about the game. This paradigm brings immediacy to social conversationconsumers have the ability to bring friends together
analytics can also establish deeper Using consumer insights, allowing companies to create more compelling user experiences.
to share experiences and to report on those experiences. These technologies have permanently altered the ways in which consumers share information, collaborate, interact, entertain themselves, inform themselves, and maintain awareness of events around them. Enterprises need to recognize the change and begin to harness it. All of this contributes to a new standard among consumers: they expect the mobile and social
experience to be highly personalized. They expect to be given the ability to get pertinent, contextual information that relates to their lives, their friends, their needs, and their pursuits. And because the experience is personalized its also more powerful. Ninety-two percent of consumers globally say they trust earned media, such as word-of-mouth endorsements or recommendations from friends and
family, above all other forms iii of advertising. Even watching TV is changing. Accenture research shows that more than 40 percent of consumers are showing increasing second screen habits, using a smartphone or tablet while watching TV such that they are accessing multiple streams of information at the same time.iv This could mean tweeting on a smartphone while watching a TV drama or viewing players statistics while watching sports. For the 2011 2012 season, the National Hockey League deployed an online game to be played while watching the Stanley Cup nals; fans won points by correctly predicting outcomes on the ice, like the result of a face-off.
networks are public, companies have an unprecedented opportunity to track what people are saying about them. More important, they have the opportunity to use these new attitudes and technologies to create relationships, which will result in customer acquisition and, for current customers, repeat sales.
Moving the mindset from transactions to relationships
The goal is to use insight to change communication with consumers from transactions to interactions to an unprecedented level of relationship and loyalty the equivalent of frequent-ier programs on steroids. The problem Based on these new behaviors, is that, until now, most enterprises businesses face several related have viewed online channels opportunities: Because many of these primarily as a way to reduce costs,
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not improve relationships. Its time to shift that mindset. Consumers are already having conversations about enterprises among themselves. Fueled by every new consumer service and every new user experience, consumer behaviors have changed far faster than businesses. Facebook, eBay, Yelp, Foursquare, and many other companies in effect continue to train huge segments of consumers to communicate among themselves, outside the purview of businesses, coming back to a business site only to conduct nal transactions. Companies may not be able to, and frankly shouldnt, take complete control of the conversations their consumers are having in these new electronic storefronts and plazas. But they do need to gure out how to become participants, react with
relevant offers, and respond to concerns. Its time for enterprises to reimagine their consumer engagement strategy. Too many are still stuck in the days of ads and focus groups. When they want to communicate to consumers, they broadcast a message through their marketing channels, and when they need to hear back, they bring together a representative group from which they can extrapolate insights. Today, the channels are increasing (think YouTube, Twitter, customer service chat) and consumer insight can come from a much wider sample of consumer and information sources: the Web, mobile technology, socialmedia sites, and others. But its important to remember in this scenario that technology is only a tool. Reimagining a consumer
time for enterprises to reimagine Its their consumer engagement strategy.
engagement strategy is not based solely on technology. That new consumer-engagement strategy will require aggregated insight across applications so that each channel feeds information into a holistic view of consumers. That means more collaboration across sales and marketing and across digital and physical sales channels, and even the ability to track and acquire information beyond the businesss own channels. Businesses should break
down the internal barriers that segment consumer interactions by channel in order to create a unied consumer strategy across all channels. Siloed approaches erode the value of integrated customer interactions. Burberry, for example, jointly developed an application with SAP that places all the consumer information Burberry has from its separate customer channels in the hand of v its sales associates. In the store, they can use an iPad to access a shoppers prole that pulls together
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contact details, transactional history, lifetime spending statistics, recommendations based on purchases, and social-media comments regarding the brand.
An omnichannel relationship strategy

Jettison the idea of a single subgroup within the enterprise that is responsible for the entire digital channel. Instead, the enterprise must gure out how all the groups will work in concert. Each group should work together toward an overarching, omnichannel relationship strategy, one that promotes collaboration and sharing among channels to manage relationships with consumers in an ongoing fashion. Enterprises must nd out how and where consumers are most comfortable interacting with them.
That may depend on circumstances as varied as demographics or proximity to a buying decision; one customer may prefer a digital interaction whereas another may prefer to speak to a live customerservice agent. Unfortunately, businesses cant automatically replace some channels in favor of others; they must allow the consumer to choose from among a portfolio of channels, depending on the consumers needs at any given time. For example, Virgin America is offering customer service through Twitter and Facebook. Customer support monitors tweets and Facebook posts to the airline for indications that someone needs help, allowing consumers to make simple requests, like reserving a wheelchair for a ight, without waiting on hold for a call center rep.vi
companies understand that different Savvy channels represent opportunities to create different experiences that truly leverage each channel. Having a portfolio of channels creates the opportunity to give a consumer the right interaction at the right time.
That said, every challenge reveals an opportunity. These new channels whether through mobile apps on smartphones, through socialnetworking capabilities such as Pinterest, or through corporate websitesallow new ways of communicating with the consumer that help increase the quality and utility of interactions. Its not a question of replacing channels or even weaving them all together into a single interface. Savvy companies understand that different channels
represent opportunities to create different experiences that truly leverage each channel. Having a portfolio of channels creates the opportunity to give a consumer the right interaction at the right time. Consider the way a retailer interacts with a customer: a discount delivered in an e-mail is often considered spam, while that same discount delivered as a consumer scans a product QR code is just good service. Understanding how, when, and
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was displayed, starting at 99 percent and ticking down by 1 percent every second until the consumer entered the Meat Pack store. When a discount was redeemed, the persons Facebook status automatically changed to inform the world. Similarly, businesses will have to disrupt the mindset that says relationships equate to marketing. This means that IT must forge close links with other groups that touch consumers and reach out to business units, such as product development, that manage interactions with other communities.
dont. Better insight into customer preferences allows businesses to iterate product development faster, to scale up production or kill a feature or a service before too much is invested. They can build future business cases on a more substantial and substantiated information base. Higher customer satisfaction equates to repeat customers and higher revenue through increased volumes and lowered cost of customer acquisition. But companies also gain from a better understanding of consumers. The deeper the relationship with the customer, the more reliable the metrics the customer provides. Again, its the difference between the vagueness of a focus group and the specicity of actual consumer behaviorthe importance of tracking what consumers do, not what they say.
where businesses should contact consumers can create a brand connection that rivals the face-toface relationship associated with the small-town general store. At the same time, businesses should recognize that social and mobile are not just a set of new channels for pushing information to consumers. Its about changing the channels function from push ads, for exampleto services and value. Businesses must coalesce on
a variety of new capabilities beyond social media (such as analytics and mobile technology) in order to reboot efforts to engage consumers in ways perhaps imagined but not implemented. For example, Guatemalan shoe store Meat Pack looked to mobile interactions to pinch customers from competitors vii through a mobile app called Hijack. When potential customers entered a rivals store, they were detected using the app and offered a promotion at Meat Pack. A discount countdown
Insight leads to increased consumer satisfaction

With deeper interaction, businesses can more quickly understand what consumers likeand what they
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Your 100-day plan

In 100 days, refresh the mindset of your consumer channels to move beyond transactions to, in addition, drive consumer interactions and relationships.
Catalog your consumer interactions, tools, and channels. Educate your internal teams on the tools and channels currently available. Determine the questions to be answered to create a holistic view of your customer. Identify metrics for tracking the success of your social and communication channels in terms of a consumer relationship. Begin social listening to build momentum toward your larger strategy. Propagate current tools and channels across business units where applicable.
With consumers changing their attitudes about sharing and accessing information and becoming willing to be more transparent, forward-thinking enterprises are realizing that they can benet from an unprecedented granular view of consumersnot just what they bought, but when, and where, and what they were doing before and while they made the purchase decision. Businesses can do this by taking advantage of internal data sources (that is, instrumentation and quantication of decision making captured by their own software) and external data sources (such as social-media sites and information gathered by resellers and partners). The goal, to use a term that may sound contradictory, is mass personalizationusing technology to provide resort service at a motel cost. That is, using what you know
about the consumer from the communications channels he uses to better understand his behavior and needs. Consumers newly accustomed to accessing account information in corporate databases to transact and interact have ratcheted up their expectations about how businesses will communicate and respond. But companies now have the ability to make the consumer feel special, to increase engagement, and to develop intimacy, as never before.
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A new level of customer intimacy

Companies that embark on this voyage of mass personalization can expect a variety of new benets. Because shoppers can move quickly and entirely digitallyfrom awareness to recommendation to purchase after interacting on blogs, Twitter, Yelp, and other social sources, its actually possible to compress the sales cycle. Offering on-the-spot promotions through digital channels also potentially increases impulse purchases. Providers that are better at controlling that experience will benet by lowering the costs of sales and marketing and generating greater sales volumes. Personalization also creates a virtuous loop. The more you personalize the experience, the
richer the data collected becomes. Companies can boost the quality of data in much the same way that night-vision goggles amplify available vision: to shine a light on data and behaviors, already present, but previously undetected. A new level of intimacy with consumers is now possible. But effectively scaling meaningful relationships represents a real change in the way companies need to approach their consumer strategies. This shift is being enabled by technology; however, implementing it will require a new, unied approach across IT and the business. Now is the time to take the next step. The customers are out there; its time for the enterprise to get to know them.
This time next year

In 365 days, reimagine your consumer strategy across the enterprise as a consumer-relationship strategy and create the cross-organizational ties to drive it.
Create a cross-functional team responsible for reviewing, updating, and improving your consumer-relationship strategy. Standardize your methodology around how consumer interactions are shared throughout the organization. Redesign your organizations communication-channel strategy in light of the holistic consumer-relationship strategy. Establish an environment to test and then deploy technologies that will support your consumer- relationship strategy. Review your metrics and data to improve your consumer interactions and update your consumer-relationship strategy.
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Sidebar: Gauging the Value of Trust
During its bankruptcy proceedings in 2011, Borders, the bookstore chain, won judicial approval to sell its intellectual property, including a customer database, to Barnes & Noble. The issue at stake: shoppers data privacy.i Anticipating privacy concerns, Borders lawyers persuaded the court to appoint an independent third party to consider the privacy impact on the 48 million Borders customers whose personal information would be transferred with the sale of the intellectual property. In the end, the customers were given the chance to opt out of the transfer.
The booksellers readiness to tell customers how their data could potentially be used and, crucially, to give them a choice in the matter shows how companies and consumers may interact in the future on issues of privacy. Its also a prime example of the mobility of data these daysand a good indicator of the importance of establishing, let alone maintaining, accountability for such data. A decade ago, Accenture asked whether enterprises could differentiate themselves based on consumer trust.ii We agged ve dimensions of trustsafekeeping of personal information, control over the data, personal access to ones
data, accountability, and the benets of letting corporations use ones dataand we spelled out practical steps that would help companies move toward operating models based on trust. Even before the age of social media and big data, our recommendations were clear: companies must seek ways to use knowledge about their customers to provide better services to them, doing so in ways that increase trust, not suspicion.
to extract insights from it. For their part, individuals are far more sensitive about the use of their data, even though more and more data is sought from them and more is given by them, both willingly and unwittingly.
In general, individuals are more likely to think in terms of whats in it for them if they give out personal data. When you put information about yourself out there, thats a transaction, Margaret Stewart, Ten years on, plenty has changed: Facebooks director of product the entities collecting information design, told Fast Company recently. are savvier than ever about data, and But you need to feel that youre they have more channels through getting something back in return. which to gather it (think big data) When we start to provide things and more powerful tools with which
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that feel valuable to people, it will they grasp the notion that they iii make that transaction make sense. need to go beyond just collecting information about consumers. Accentures recommendations for The company that can build a businesses are even more relevant reputation for providing valuable today, and the stakes have gotten services while using consumers higherwith consumers greater personal data in trustworthy sensitivity being just one of the ways will have a big advantage factors in play. Accenture believes over competitors. Its brand will be that a vital component is still more valuable, it will have more missing from the privacy debate: opportunities to attract and retain a proactive business perspective lifetime customers, and it can focused not just on compliance become a preferred partner in a with laws that protect privacy but larger value chain of goods also on the notion that companies and services. can generate business value by earning consumer trust. Implicit in this idea is the belief that trust has an economic value To date, few businesses and, as such, can be used to win convincingly demonstrate that competitive advantage. In that
respect, thinking of trust as an economic asset is not different from how a bank views and manages its customers accounts. Of course, a critical aspect of trust building is the assurance that all of the business partners in an organizations value chain abide by the same high principles. If a person using a supposedly trust-based solution is suddenly deluged with unwanted phone calls and e-mail from related companies, you can bet thats a customer lost forever.
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Trend 1. Relationships at scale
Design for Analytics Formulate the questions, and design for the answers
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Trend 2. Design for Analytics
Design for Analytics

Business intelligence. Data analytics. Big data. Companies are no longer suffering from a lack of data; theyre suffering from a lack of the right data. Business leaders need the right data in order to effectively dene the strategic direction of the enterprise. The current generation of software was designed for functionality. The next generation must be designed for analytics as well.
Predicting the future isnt difficult. Predicting the future with some degree of accuracy is. Businesses are under the impression that the more data they have, the easier it will be to predict the future and thus secure competitive advantage. Collecting more data points makes it easier to discern trends, patterns, opportunities, and competitive advantage. Thats one of the reasons companies are focusing so heavily on big data and the ability to utilize
unstructured data from previously unplumbed sources (such as social media, call center transcripts, and e-mail). They are working under the assumption that more data is equivalent to better data. They are only partially correct. The problem is no longer the absence of enough data. In fact, enterprises are now being ooded with new data, big-data tools mine countless new unstructureddata sources, social media now
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provide unprecedented information about consumers, and sensors and embedded devices expand the ability to gather data into areas where computing power has never been before. The problem now becomes the absence of the right data. The IT world we live in today revolves around software applications. Businesses have developed data models to support application functionality, which is necessary
for the application to do its job. If an e-commerce application needs to know what device a consumer is connecting from in order to authenticate the consumer, it captures that information; if the application doesnt need to know, and knowing doesnt support the user experience, it doesnt. Most companies have also taken the next stepfor example, they recognize that consumer information is valuable for future insight, so they
capture more of it where they can. help the company achieve its most But generally they have not done this basic goals. With every data gap, with any specic question in mind. enterprises miss an opportunity to make better decisions or improve So, when this data is repurposed how they run their business. To move as an input to make strategic forward, to answer the question, you decisionssuch as entering a new have to adopt a data-rst strategy market or pricing a new service and plug the data gaps. glaring information gaps often arise. The goal isnt to amass data. Plugging these data gapsthat is, Its about enabling the business getting the right datarequires to answer a question, to create a fundamental shift in design insight, and to use that insight to philosophy for how new applications
problem is no longer the absence of enough data. In fact, enterprises The are now being ooded with new data, big-data tools mine countless new unstructured-data sources, social media now provide unprecedented information about consumers, and sensors and embedded devices expand the ability to gather data into areas where computing power has never been before. The problem now becomes the absence of the right data.
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are built and existing applications are congured, instrumented, and updated. Applications still must meet users functionality needs, but applications now must also be designed to specically produce data that answers more of an enterprises questions. Technology is no longer the barrier. The barrier is strategic business foresight to formulate the questions.
To get the right data, you have to design applications to explicitly capture the specic data needed, update user interfaces to get new pieces of data, and add data collection as a new set of requirements within the software procurement process. These capabilities become a piece of the upfront processes for how you lay out road maps for your systems, not something that is added on after the fact.
The result is the rst stage of a data supply chain, where applications serve not only their users but also the business as it looks to applications data for answers to the questions most important to the business.
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The minimum mindset: data as a strategic asset

Businesses have the right idea: data is a strategic asset. Data (good data) makes you smarter. A recent study of 179 companies, led by an economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, suggests that companies that adopted datadriven decision-making have productivity levels 5 to 6 percent higher than can be explained by other factors, including investment in technology.i Savvy companies are working to discern more about transactions and events than ever before. Theyre looking for context and ways to make the insights they gain actionable. Theyre trying to understand not only what happened but why. And, when did it happen?
What transpired before it happened? What transpired afterward? It could be a purchasing scenario that reveals the associated items that customers buy. But it could also be a failed online purchase. Did someone get a coupon from Starbucks but go next door to Dunkin Donuts anyway? The desire to get these answers is why companies are investing so heavily in big data, business intelligence, and reporting tools. The fact that they are still investing means that they havent yet found the solution, even though so much technology is available. Companies need to start looking for the solution to the problem a different way.
Quantifying the world around us

When enterprises dont have access to the right data, they need to start looking differently at how they go about getting data. Companies cant rely solely on the limited universe of data that they already have. The focus now needs to shift to quantifying the enterprise: capturing the actions, interactions, and attributes of the employees and processes that make an enterprise
tick. They must step out of the box and formulate the right questions that will help the business make strategic decisions. The data thats necessary will become evident. The challenge, then, will be guring out not only how to collect it, but, in many cases, how to create it. Many software vendors are already starting to make it easier for enterprises to tackle this challenge. Third parties are increasingly creating APIs to allow data to
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enterprises dont have access to the right When data, they need to start looking differently at how they go about getting data. Companies cant rely solely on the limited universe of data that they already have.
and their ultimate score but also their keystrokes, how long it took them to answer individual questions, and if they stopped in the middle of an assignment or question. We're physically collecting thousands of data points per student per day, said founder and CEO Jose Ferreira. iii Companies are also looking to the blossoming of sensor technology to ll data gaps as they arise. This technology represents a way to create and collect information from physical environments and devices that today represent blind spots in a companys data portfolio. Research company Strategy Analytics predicts that cellular machine-to-machine (M2M) connections necessary to transport the data from distributed sensors to the data center will grow from 277 million in 2012 to 2.5 billion by 2020.iv
The companies that have already dened their top-level strategic questions are striking rst. Many companies in logistics, transportation, and energy, for instance, have already clearly dened their need to track the movement of goods and the usage of power. UPS has developed a system of in-vehicle sensors and handheld computers to track information not only about its shipments but also about its trucks movements. This is what helped it determine that making left turns slowed deliveries and increased fuel costs as a result of idling; it used the information to create routes that minimized left turns, saving the company 9 v million gallons of gas annually. In addition, knowing when trucks are going to reach their destinations helps UPSs employees ensure that there are sufficient resources to load
be more easily extracted from software products, including packaged software applications. This further puts the onus on companies to figure out what data they should be gathering from their systems to answer the companys broader questions. Companies are also increasingly adding instrumentation to their custom applications, designing them to collect and report transactions, activities, or logs. For instance, to
help improve its recommendations engine, Netix tracks how customers interact with on-demand lm downloads. It looks at metrics such as when customers pause the movie and what scenes they watch over again.ii In another example, to continuously improve the quality and effectiveness of its online class materials, Knewton incorporates the ability to track specic data about how students use its software. It tracks not only how long it takes students to complete an assignment
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and unload them. Knowing where shipments are in transit (and sharing that information on a website) aids customer service.
In the energy industry, Shell joint venture Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) has deployed a wireless system in its oil eld. It is currently wiring 5,000 wells, which technicians remotely monitor and manage, to provide real-time communication To date, of course, the ripest area vi and control. According to PDO, for the collection of data has been
the wireless information network enhances well efficiency and reduces operating costs because workers no longer have to physically visit each well to collect operating data and recongure the system. This also contributes to personnel safety.
Quantifying the consumer
ability to cultivate and harvest customer The information for sales, marketing, and advertising represents a rich opportunity to grab some of the data that they [businesses] need in order to resolve questions about their consumers that have long been left unanswered.
the quantication of the consumer. Facebook has ingrained a propensity for people to share their likes and dislikes. Businesses have known for years that customers prefer recommendations from known sources. The ability to cultivate and harvest customer information for sales, marketing, and advertising represents a rich opportunity to grab some of the data that they need in order to resolve questions about their consumers that have long been left unanswered. The aggregation of social and mobile capabilities through applications such as Waze (a crowd-sourced navigation app) and Yelp (online consumer reviews) has heightened the ability for consumers to quantify themselves. But theres also been an associated increase in personal electronic and medical devices, beyond smartphones, that collect
and transmit information, primarily in the personal-tness space. The Nike+ FuelBand collects data about calories burned, for example, and FitBit collects data regarding users sleep patterns. Personal tness and social media also overlap on websites where people track their diets. A lot of consumer data exists today, but companies need to determine the right data for them and then start processes to acquire that data. Websites already have multiple capabilities for tracking activity, but sometimes what is needed can be gleaned by simply asking customers and prospects for input. However, its important to note that often its better to track actual activity than to polltheres typically a delta between what people say they want and what people actually want.
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Businesses also have a newfound ability to utilize pieces of data that they may already possess but that previously hasnt been easily usable: unstructured data represented by free text in e-mail, tweets, and other media; audio les from call center conversations; and video from sites where customers interact with products. Finally, consider the availability of information thats been collected by others for integration into your analysis. This could come from a variety of sourcesservice providers, social networks, search engines, even vendor software already running in your data centers. For instance, Intellicorp has developed a software product that can analyze changes within SAP ERP applications; it sells the product to SAP customers for data-management and data-lifecycle uses.
What do these examples portend? Opportunities for consumer data feeds are everywhere. You just need to form the right questions for your business and start strategically quantifying the world around you.
Creating a data supply chain

Its time to start treating your data less as a warehouse and more as a supply chain. Having identied your sources of data, you must corral it for analysis, in the same way that the various components of an automobile from multiple suppliers come together on an assembly line. Recognize that the data wont be static; it will be manipulated as it goes through the supply chain, added to other pieces of data, updated as more recent data comes along, and sometimes transformed
into new products (think insights) as you look at different pieces of data in aggregate. Just as important, companies should be able to feed information back to their suppliers in order to help them incrementally improve the latters data collection just as an auto manufacturer must report component failures back to suppliers in order to improve quality. Once you identify the data supply chain, how do you harness it?
Once youve designed for analytics, how do you actually conduct the analytics? Analytics have always been a challenge, but partially because businesses have often conducted the process in an exploratory fashiontheyve collected available data and then analyzed it, rather than assiduously determining what data will aid their business strategy and then ensuring that the right data is collected to analyze. They can derive increased
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value by collecting data with the real end purpose in mind. The result: better data, which equals better insight. Ford Motor Company research logically deduced that the customers of its hybrid vehicles preferred using electric power as much as possible. However, the system was originally designed to deploy electric power based on other parameters, such as amount of battery power remaining. But Ford developed an algorithm using data from the cars built-in GPS systems to track when drivers were close to home or frequently vii visited locations close to home. Knowing that the vehicles were more likely to be within the range of a battery charge, the engineers were able to adjust the powertrain controls to rely more on electricity than on gasoline in those scenarios. Customers dont see the algorithm
working, but they do see that theyre relying more on electric power, which delivers higher levels of customer satisfaction. In a short time, savvy businesses can create a virtuous feedback loop that allows them to collect, analyze, and respond in an increasingly agile manner, and then revisit their questions on a periodic basis in order to continuously assess new data in the context of changing business conditions and strategies. This will require the integrated involvement of IT with the business, because IT may need to tweak data collection mechanisms, including user interfaces, on mobile apps and enterprise applications in order to acquire additional data points.
Foresight: establishing a feedback loop for insight

What will the feedback loop look like when software is designed for analytics? It starts with setting goals and creating questions that need to be answered. Ask the leaders of organizations within your enterprise if they can clearly articulate the key
specic questions they are trying to answer; many will not be able to, and fewer still will have those questions documented and feeding into teams to answer them. Though obvious on the surface, this task should not be underestimated. It is not trivial. And it is not something for which most companies have a formal process. They need to create one.
will the feedback loop look like What when software is designed for analytics? It starts with setting goals and creating questions that need to be answered.
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will need to distribute the data You requirements to your software development team, of course, but also begin working with your partners and software vendors so that they can begin to collect data as well.
With a process in place, you then need to align the questions with data requirements and disseminate those requirements accordingly. You will need to distribute the data requirements to your software development team, of course, but also work with your partners and software vendors so that they can begin to collect data as well. Finally, think about other sources of data you want to incorporate for analysis.
Then you are ready to close the loop. To whom will the information be distributed so that it can be acted upon? Designing the process so that information ows into the organization is equally important.
harvesting obvious to the user yet unobtrusive. As part of an update to its online marketplace, eBay posts photographs of merchandise to users, Pinterest style, based on data derived from previous purchases, previous searches, and stated interests. A better user interface, yes, but this design also gives eBay the ability to get deeper insight into its users not only by simply asking them for their preferences but also by looking at how they interact with viii the pictures shown to them.
driven or at least to work with them to provide the required data. Procter & Gamble and Walmart actively share supply chain information with each other to help reduce inventories while increasing sales by focusing on ix rapidly changing customer demands. Businesses must also think about how they can maximize the availability of data sources. Look at currently packaged software applications or SaaS applications for how they can be recongured or how APIs can be utilized to supply data. In existing applications, think about how the interface can be updated for better data gathering for instance, adding new entry points to accommodate inputs about seasonal needs or short-term promotions. In new applications, designing for data capture should carry as much weight as the initial application requirements.
Developers must use design methodologies that allow rapid testing, updating, and reconguring. The cultural shift to an insightIn that way, businesses can driven business will also require determine which methods work different thinking about personnel best in acquiring the strongest data. and partners. Corporate developers Businesses will also have to rethink will need to focus on incorporating their relationships with partner methods of data harvesting into user organizations in order to persuade interface designs, making the data them to become equally insight-
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Changing a corporate culture

Designing for analytics is about more than simply adding a few data requirements to a software development cycle or an RFP; it is the next step in transforming the enterprise culture to become insightdriven. Its about blurring the lines between business functions (as the consumers of business data) and IT (as the purveyors of data) to make both more effective. Pushing these ideas, many enterprises will go so far as to create a prominent new role in the organization, a chief data officer, a data champion whose responsibilities encompass the collection, prioritization, distribution, and analysis of data. But, with or without a data champion, each employee must be tasked with
looking for ways to collect better data, more data, fresher data. Its not just the software that should be refreshed to collect data and conduct analyticsits the employees, too. By deploying these capabilities, businesses will move themselves closer to the goal of being completely insight-driven, of being the kind of company that systematically uses data at all levels of the organization to become smarter and more successful. Its time to take the next step. Its time to evolve applications and products beyond just user functionality and make them actively feed your analytics. Give the business not just data, but the right data.
Your 100-day plan

In 100 days, define the key strategic questions for the business and the data needed to answer them.
Update or build your data catalog, identifying what data you have. Determine your in-ight analytics projects and what questions these projects are trying to answer. Prioritize the existing strategic questions your organization is working on. Begin to catalog new data sources (internal and external) needed to ll in critical missing data elements. Tap the new data sources where they ll identied data gaps. Dene the required skills and experience needed to create data champions across the organization.
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This time next year

In 365 days, establish your data supply chain across the enterprise, quantifying the world around you to address strategic gaps.
Create data champions across the organization, for example, a chief data officer. Work across the organization to determine and prioritize your future strategic questions. Look at your data catalog and determine the long-term gaps. Fill these gaps in the data catalogpurchase data, develop new APIs, and ask your partners. Embed new data requirements into software road maps and procurement plans. Begin designing software to capture new data within custom development and software update cycles. Develop a data creation strategy to attain data through the setup of new data sources: M2M, new software, and data creation from partners. Put the data cycle in motion, revisiting data needs as new strategic questions arise.
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Sidebar: Why the Business Now Needs to Care About APIs

In earlier times, applications (and their data) didnt really travel far in the enterprise. Applications were specic to jobs, and the data they produced remained locked inside, rarely fullling its true potential for the enterprise. Data on consumer segments used by the marketing group would rarely have been sought by engineering or manufacturing, say, or even offered to external parties. Things are different today. Its becoming increasingly important for the underlying data and business functions to be made available for general useable to be quickly reworked in ways that help shorten cycle times, cut costs, or accelerate revenue elsewhere in the business. APIsthe glue that connects apps with business processes and with each otherhave typically been a fairly low-level concern for programmers and architects. But with the businesss increasing reliance on data and servicesboth public and privateand the growing reuse of those building blocks, APIs are rapidly becoming a strategic concern. For example, the car-sharing service RelayRides relies on an API created by General Motors and OnStar to access some of the remote control and telematics elements of the service.i Organizations must now consciously manage the proliferation of increasingly important APIs. The beauty of APIs is that they uncouple the front end service the business accessfrom the IT mechanisms that support it. As user groups and use cases change, access and management-policy updates dont affect IT implementation, and vice versa: APIs can provide selfserve access for developersinternal, partner, and independent third party giving others the power to create new and innovative use cases. And IT updates can happen at any time without users knowing it, or needing to know. Managed well, APIs can help enterprises handle complexity as the need to access data and services grows. In an increasingly quantied digital world, API management provides a mechanism to leverage data and services to meet business goals. The benet of discrete API management is that it keeps complexity under control. Specically, the API management solutions now offered by providers such as Apigee, Layer 7 Technologies, and Mashery make it possible to organize, expose, and monetize APIs. The organization benet is very real: formal management of APIs deals with the sprawl, redundancies, and inefficiencies that will proliferate as increasingly quantied enterprises begin to share many more data sources and services, both internally and externally.
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API management tools help expose a common platform of functionality. They minimize rework. And they accelerate development, which is a key rst step when embarking on cloud, mobile, or social roadmaps. Just one snapshot: construction and engineering company Bechtel has an API strategy that provides relevant information to its global teams from the data generated and stored as it executes its projects, thereby enabling the teams to be more agile and better equipped to make informed decisions.ii Finally, API management makes it possible to measure the value of APIs. Imagine a scenario that involves explicit governance of APIs; you have visibility and control into who is
using your APIs and which APIs are most valuable, as well as traceability of IT capability against business use, ensuring business process alignment and verication against business cases.
growing global workforce, it would be increasingly critical for business users to have access to enterprise and application data in real time in order to scale up those applications.
is based on the same core building block concepts as SOA, but it has evolved to take advantage of the agility and simplicity of cloud and Web-based approaches. So the next question is, Who needs to be responsible for API management? Currently, the only people who know or care about APIs are found on the development teams. But theres a need for a centralized function that brings some order and discipline to todays random and informal interactions between business users and IT staff. Does the buck stop on the CIOs desk? Or is this part of the purview of a newly minted chief data officer? In either case, the API management role must be dened.
The IT team opted to build an API A case in point: Accenture is carefully layer that would make available the managing APIs as a key step to enable various data and business functions cloud and mobile strategies across for general use and standardize our global workforce of more than access across users. The APIs could 250,000 people. With as-a-service then be used to help implement new and mobile-device models playing services and to provide new user larger roles in Accentures delivery experiences on mobile devices such as of functionality for activities such as tablets and smartphones. time entry, hotel reservations, and business travel, Accentures internal If API management sounds a lot like IT team realized that integration service-oriented architecture (SOA) with disparate systems was going an inuential technology concept a to become challenging. And with a decade agothats because it is. It
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Data Velocity Matching the speed of decision to the speed of action
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Trend 3. Data Velocity
Data Velocity
Business leaders have been bombarded with statistics about the soaring volumes of data that they can mine for precious insights. They have been deluged with articles describing the incredible variety of external data hidden in everything from tweets and blogs to sensor outputs and GPS data from mobile phones. But the next perspective on data that deserves attention is data velocitythe pace at which data can be gathered, sorted, and analyzed in order to produce insights that managers can act on quickly. As expectations of near-instant responses become the norm, business leaders will rely heavily on higher data velocities to gain a competitive edge.
Its become an article of faith among business leaders that their data contains a treasury of powerful insights that can help their organizations make money. Theyre also getting used to the idea that data can mean whats gleaned from Facebook postings or remotely located machines just as much as whats in corporate data centers. Just ask Walmart, which deployed a new search engine last fall on Walmart.com that relies on data from platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest to secondguess consumer behavior, increasing sales conversion rates by 10 to 15 percent in the process.i But theres another aspect that business leaders have yet to fully grasp: data velocity. That concept by itself is not new; together with variety and volume, it has been part of the three Vs construct for talking about dataa construct
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developed in 2001, long before big data became such an overused term.ii And at the most fundamental level, there is nothing novel about the idea of faster ows of data helping organizations get more done in less time. But the notion of velocity has been largely eclipsed by the many recent advances in technologies that have unlocked signicant increases both in available volume (zettabyte upon petabyte) and in variety (spanning unstructured data such as pins on Pinterest as well as structured records of supply logistics and customers purchase histories). Today, its increasingly important to match the speed of the organizations actions to the speed of its opportunities. If too much time elapses between acquisition of data and the ability to use the data
its increasingly important to match Today, the speed of the organizations actions to the speed of its opportunities.
to generate actionable insights, the organization will start losing out to more responsive competitors. More worrisome, if the business hasnt begun using data-driven insight to detect and evaluate opportunities in the rst place, it runs even greater risks of falling behind. Consumer-goods giant Procter & Gamble is acutely aware of whats at stake: CIO Filippo Passerini told InformationWeek that if P&G can eliminate the what discussions and some of the why, and decisionmakers can jump right to how to solve a problem, that radically increases the pace at which the decision makers do business.iii The old model, he said, would mean that analysts would get back with answers in two weeks. You need to be able to answer that question immediately, he told the magazine. P&G is investing in virtual, instant on war rooms where professionals meet in person or over video around continuous streams of fresh and relevant data, inviting the right experts as soon as a problem surfaces. P&Gs objective is to give these decision-making forums access to data as soon as possible
after it has been collected. Passerini explained that hes not seeking new types of data; what he wants is to get everything from point-of-sale data to statistics on inventories and shipments more frequently and far faster, in more granular form than ever.iv In all of these discussions about data velocity, note that were not talking about striving for some real-time nirvana. Whats crucial is an improving rate of response, regardless of the rising volumes of data to be accessed and analyzed and irrespective of their proliferating sources. Going forward, it will no longer be about the size of your datait will be about matching the velocity of your data to how fast your business processes need to act on it.
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When fast still isnt fast enough

Irritated that the Web page on your smartphone is downloading so slowly? Remember a time before smartphones? Thats just one tiny reflection of the time-starved age we live in, and a clear indication of how much expectations have risen. Increasing expectations are a primary factor pushing businesses all of us, actuallyto ask for and act on data more quickly. Mobility as a new channel for information has catapulted those expectations far forward; its addictive to have easy fingertip access to large amounts of data. The more data we have, the more we wantand app developers are happy to oblige us. The Web is literally in hand, wherever we go and whenever we want it, goading us to expect the same responsiveness
and openness on our desktops, TVs, and even our car dashboards. Not to mention that the next generation of consumers is growing up with expectations of instant responses as a way of life. Enterprises have realized that smartphones and tablets are perfect vehicles for making informed decisions anywhere and anytime, based on targeted, personalized information. Hence the fact that SAP and others offer business intelligence software that provides the mobile workforce with the capability to stay up to date with
insights about customers, products, work orders, and more.
Concurrently, the user base for data is exploding. Business users are becoming more technical at Instant, mobile access to data is only the same time that analytics skills one way that expectations about and techniques are becoming more data velocity are changing. Were accessible to technical users, further starting to ask new things of our increasing the demands on available enterprise systems, too, thanks to data. Within living memory, data the continuing consumerization of was the province of the guys in IT. Long accustomed to being able to white coats in the air-conditioned track our Amazon.com orders via the mainframe room. Today, everybody online services of FedEx or the U.S. who wants to be a data pro can be a Postal Service, we now wonder why data pro. we cant as easily do the same with our companys inbound Yes, for years now almost every supply chain. business function has had its power users of technology, but today, leading companies expect their regular business users not only to consume data but also to seek, acquire, evaluate, analyze, and share it. Those organizations consider serious data savvy and analytical skills to be requirements for many more of their employees than ever before.
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Narrowing windows of opportunity

Another powerful factor pushing the need for more data more quickly is that the windows of opportunity are smaller in almost all business endeavors. The windows have been closing for some time. In the 1980s, Harvard Business Review explored the topic, notably with its landmark article on time-based competition. v And decades ago, then General Electric chief Jack Welch was famously preaching about speed and responsiveness. Speed of response is increasingly important at the functional and transactional levels. Take Web interactions, for instance. Lets say you run a retail company: when a shopper lands on your product page, youve got a few split seconds to give her information that is relevant
and engaging. But were not talking just about short page-load times. The key is in how to leverage insight to make that experience awesome. You have to be able to connect with the shoppertying the experience together based on past interactions, purchase history, questions she e-mailed to your customer-support team, social links, and any other data or any insight you can muster. The same holds true when you want to bid in real-time ad auctions to try to lure shoppers back to your site from elsewhere on the Web. In the milliseconds available, you need the ability to process the data tidbits at hand so that you can compose a message that is personal, intriguing, and compelling enough to prompt a shopper to click your ad, bringing you the traffic you seek. Fast data responses and rapid analysis are also crucial in the
maintenance and repair world. At the extreme, a grounded airplane costs airlines as much as $250,000 per day; an oil rig that isnt drilling can cost $1 million per day. The sooner an equipment malfunction or imminent shutdown can be detected, and the more detailed the data about the equipments condition, the quicker it can be repaired and made productive againand, if captured, the more data there will be to help predict future breakdowns and more effectively plan future maintenance regimens.
The story is similar for dynamic supply chains. Responding to changes in the supply chain with a combination of historical data and brand-new intelligence allows you to create a more responsive, resilient supply chain. If your company was unable to properly see a recent drop in production yields from an aging manufacturing plant, you may have difficulty meeting customers orders on time. You did not match your speed of insight with speed of action.
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In the utilities sector, investments in smart grids are putting morefrequent data updates in the hands of those matching electricity supply to demand to keep the grid stable. But the clearest example of the need for speed in data utilization comes from capital markets, where quotes are submitted and withdrawn in millionths of a second. When trading systems can handle transactions in trillionths of a second, they will.
New technologies that put data on skates

As far back as 2008, Accentures Technology Vision spoke to the growing variety of data relevant to the enterprisevideo, audio, blogs, social datamuch of it usergenerated. We also addressed the technologies that were emerging to process this unstructured data. For the past two years, weve showcased
new technology advances aimed at tackling data variety and volume: platforms, services, and architectures. Converging data architectures are reshaping our whole view of data in the enterprise, and industrialized data services help us get that data out into the enterprise, where it can generate new value. Whats happening now is a surge of new technologies that help to accelerate the whole data cycle from insight to action, increasing the enterprises ability to deal with data velocity. To start with, a slew of providers have pushed high-speed data storage much further. Appliances relying on solid-state disk (SSD) to speed data input and outputexamples include Oracles Exadata and Teradatas Extreme
Performance Applianceoffer huge speed increases over conventional storage. To squeeze out even faster performance, more attention is going to in-memory techniques that sharply minimize input and output by moving all kinds of data sets into main memory rather than onto (and off of) any form of disk drive. In-memory technology is already moving into the corporate data center. According to Gartner, the adoption of in-memory computing is expected to increase threefold by 2015 as a result of decreases in memory costs.vi The use of in-memory technology marks an inection point for enterprise applications. With inmemory computing and insert-only databases using row- and columnoriented storage, transactional and analytical processing can be unied. In-memory data warehousing nally offers the promise of real-time
happening now is a surge of new Whats technologies that help to accelerate the whole data cycle from insight to action, increasing the enterprises ability to deal with data velocity.
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computing; business leaders can now ask ad hoc questions of the production transaction database and get the answers back in seconds. SAPs HANA appliance is arguably making the most visible waves. Since its launch in June 2011, HANA has been the fastest-growing product in SAPs history.viiIn brief, HANA is a exible, multipurpose, data-sourceagnostic in-memory appliance that combines SAP software components
on hardware provided and delivered by SAPs leading hardware partners. Data can be replicated from SAP in real time and is captured in memory as business happens, where exible views expose analytic information rapidly. External data can be added to analytic models to expand analysis across the entire organization. Luxury retailer Burberry expects HANA to provide realtime access to customer histories when customers walk into the
store, allowing sales associates to identify opportunities to better serve them and match products to their individual tastes.viii
New exploration methods that will let humans process data faster
Of course, professional users have to be able to interpret what the software is telling them. So several providers are rening visualization technologies that speed up employees processing of data, shortening the time it takes to evaluate whats being communicated and to make a decision, thereby creating faster time to insight and freeing users to deal with more decisions. Nearly all of the leading analytics vendorsincluding SAS, SAP, and Oraclehave corresponding
data visualization solutions to help users understand complex data. One playerTableau Softwaretraces its roots to technology used to help create some of the most successful early computer-generated animation movies, such as Toy Story. Another virtuous cycle comes into play here: the faster the data can be processed and analyzed, the more terabytes can be poured into the system. At the same time, newer low-cost analytical packages decrease the time needed for problem-driven exploration. These toolsmostly open sourcegreatly facilitate the iterative querying of data, accelerating users ability to narrow in on the right questions so as to nd the best nuggets of insight. Tools such as Apache Mahout, R, and D3.js make it easier for IT professionals who are not analytics specialists to explore and iterate
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essentially realizing more quickly that they didnt ask the right question and promptly circling back to do so. These are really do it yourself analytical packages, different from traditional business intelligence reporting software, that make it easy for nonspecialists to write their own algorithms. One solutions providerPredixion Softwareallows developers to create analytical models and package them for deployment to others, enabling those other users to leverage the models without being analytics experts themselves. At certain points, it will be possible to automate decisions. Once the insight has been discovered during exploratory analysisthe earlier part of the data cyclethen the actual decision making can often be mechanized. Consider the example of an electric utility that is seeing
substantial increases in demand as more electric vehicles appear on the streets. Based on the insight that, for a given municipality, registrations of new electric vehicles directly increase the strain on the electric gridan insight that comes oncethen the electric utility can automatically prioritize portions of the grid in certain neighborhoods for equipment upgrades each month based on input from that months registrations of electric cars. There are also new moves to take technologies that are designed to handle large volumes of unstructured datalargely batch technologiesand adapt them to work in real time, or as close as possible to real time. The goal is to attain a level of dynamic querybuilding and execution to match the relative rate at which the underlying data is changing. For instance,
practice, speed costs money, and even with In new advances in technology we dont expect that fact to change overnight. So it is crucial for IT groups to still rely on non-real-time data where possible.
SQLstream handles real-time SQL queries against streaming data, leveraging and accelerating existing queries against data warehouses and other SQL-based repositories. Similarly, Clouderas Impala and the open-source project Storm are both developing modications of Hadoop to move beyond batch processing to near-real-time MapReduce-style queries. The beauty of transforming tools built for batch work into real-time analytics suites is that it enables users to run huge data
sets without having to resort to notoriously inaccurate random sampling of the data.
Hybrid models for boosting data velocity

In practice, speed costs money, and even with new advances in technology we dont expect that fact to change overnight. So it is
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Your 100-day plan

In 100 days, create a data velocity strategy to match the speed of your insights to the window of opportunity available to act on them.
Survey business units to determine where they have critical decision-making bottlenecks. Determine which decisions are data-processing dependent. Prioritize opportunities based on the cost-benefit tradeoffs for accelerating the decision. Speed costs money.
Create tactical deployments based on the prioritized opportunities with current tools and methods. Data champions should update the data catalog to incorporate data-processing criteria.
crucial for IT groups to still rely on non-real-time data where possible, blending fast and slow to solve problems cost-effectively. Of course, skilled developers already do this; for some, it harks back to their training in engineering. Enterprise systems are no different. You might, for example, precompute much of your customer analytics. The batch analysis from your weekly churn report may tell you that youre in danger of losing a longtime customer, but discovering that that customer, already identified as at-risk, is currently browsing lower-cost service options on your Web site could give you the hook to find a way to keep from losing your customer altogether. As the challenges of accelerating data become more sophisticated involving soaring volumes of unstructured data, for examplethe
trick will be to apply hybrid insight as often as possible. This calls not only for changes in architecture but for changes in skills as well. It requires that software-engineering leaders seek out and reward developers who demonstrate a definite speed mindset. Those who show an aptitude for blending real-time insight with batch insightand knowing when to use eachwill be extremely valuable. For example, take the case of a healthcare-insurance provider that has to meet a tight deadline on a government mandate to predict subscriber attrition. The IT group can run the work in batches to meet the compliance deadline, but over the long term, the group can use the insights from that work to understand and predict attrition propensity in every other interaction with insured patients and
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use that insight to tailor messages and content that will seek to engage the patient and combat the attrition risk. In short, we can realistically expect that many organizations will do what they can to push for faster data processing by using non-realtime approaches, weaving in more and more real-time modes as time and funding allow.
to have strong risk management, a lot of cash, the willingness to invest even when the future is unclear, and ix great people.
This time next year

In 365 days, begin to transform key processes, accelerating the insights where the increased velocity leads to tangible business outcomes.
Use your data catalog to create a strategic view of the data that creates bottlenecks. Determine if current infrastructure already supports a turnkey solution that alleviates these bottlenecks. (e.g., use of HANA for SAP). Test and deploy required technologies and sources of data that improve your data-processing bottlenecks. Update the IT road map and architecture to reflect additional technologies and data sources. Deploy the next set of prioritized opportunities that will leverage the new architecture. Measure business outcomes and review the catalog for additional opportunities.
To be sure, the rise of volatility and market turbulence puts more emphasis on the need to get risk management right. But there is more to it than that. Accenture has found that several high performers view ongoing uncertainty as nonstop opportunity. More and more of these companies see competitive advantage in time to insight, and as a result, they are investing not only in the In a recent letter to shareholders, GE tools that can help them accelerate chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt their data cycles but also in the skills nicely summed up his teams and capabilities that reect a need perspective on the need for agility for speed. For them, increasing data and responsiveness: When the velocity isnt just an abstraction or an environment is continuously unstable, obscure objective for IT professionals; it is no longer volatile. Rather, we it is a business necessity that gives have entered a new economic era. . . . them a chance to open up a big lead Nothing is certain except for the need on their competitors.
A high-velocity opportunity
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Seamless Collaboration Right channel, right worker, right job
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Trend 4. Seamless Collaboration
Seamless Collaboration
It is time for the enterprise to reimagine the way its employees work. The rise in social networking has breathed new life into collaboration. Users new social behavior and growing expectation that every app will be social are pushing companies to create new user experiences. However, to increase productivity, enterprises must move beyond standalone social and collaboration channels; they must begin to directly embed those channels into their core business processes. The new approach: build social, collaborative applications throughout the enterprise.
Enterprises are always pushing to enhance the way their employees communicate with each other. The reasoning is simple: better communication leads to faster and higher-quality work, which, in turn, leads to increased productivity. They see social technology changing the way users interact and collaborate with each other, and they naturally want to harness that proclivity toward communication and
collaboration within the enterprise. But many are looking at it the wrong way. Consumers widely use Twitter, but that does not mean that deploying Twitter to employees will solve the communication challenges a company faces. Facebook is highly social and incorporates e-mail and the sharing of photos and documents, but that doesnt make it appropriate for the corporate world.
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Why doesnt it translate? Simply put, motivations and behavior differ in each sphere. In their personal lives, people are internally motivated to want to follow the details of their friends and familys activities; people are social, and the drive to stay in touch and connected is strong. At work, people have a different motivation: to get their job done as quickly and effectively as possible. However, using social tools as designed today, to follow coworkers en masse, often becomes more of a time sink than a time saver. That doesnt mean social technologies wont work for enterprises. In fact, companies have been extremely successful at streamlining interactions with consumersfor example, by integrating instant messaging into e-commerce and technical support
sites. But in the consumer setting, enterprises are motivated to adopt the technologies that consumers use to make their lives easier. They now need to do the same for their employees: use these technologies to make employees jobs easier. Enterprises that want the benets of a highly collaborative, social workforce must integrate such technology into the systems that employees use every dayand clearly demonstrate to those employees how it will make them better at their job. Unfortunately, enterprise collaboration today is still a set of siloed communication channels, from e-mail to videoconference to social-activity streams (basically a timeline of activity, similar to what you see on a Facebook page). Users are expected to gure out how to use those channels to
do their job and improve their productivity themselves. Companies need to go beyond what social sites are doing, what they might be offering consumers on websites, and look to new ways to solve the collaboration challenge. They need to use collaboration and social channels in such a way that they have the potential to create specic, measurable productivity gains. The real productivity gains from these technologies will stem from a companys ability to
integrate the social technologies into its business processes and the software that supports them. This means companies cant wait for software vendors to build a bolt-on solution to address strategic needs. To realize these gains, it will be the enterprises job to actively identify the core processes where improving productivity will drive the most value and then to weave in the tools. For example, in a recent survey of more than 220 CRM decision makers, Nucleus Research found that adding
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social capabilities to CRM drives an average increase in sales staff productivity of 11.8 percent.i Integrating collaboration channels into business processes has the potential to both streamline the way employees work and make business processes more efficient. Social tools and strategies will provide the mechanisms and metaphors to integrate them effectively.
Why now?
Tackling collaboration now is both easier and more important than ever. Its easier because employees are already inclined to collaborate; it is the natural way that people work. And with the introduction of social technology into their personal lives, they are looking for that same
worker is increasingly an information Every worker. Businesses are demanding more from employees; workers are expected to be constantly informed while producing faster results and better decisions.
kind of effortless communication within the applications that support their jobs. They are becoming more comfortable with sharing information, in essence becoming more transparent about what they do, why, and its importance. By aligning users newfound tendencies for transparency and social interaction with business goals, businesses have an opportunity to deploy collaboration in a way that their users will actually adopt. Social tools, such as Yammer and Chatter, are rapidly maturing. Both offer APIs that let companies more easily integrate them into their applications. In the open-source world, the OpenSocial API lets developers incorporate collaboration in a similar way. At the same time, its important because every worker is increasingly an information worker. Businesses
are demanding more from employees; workers are expected to be constantly informed while producing faster results and better decisions. All the while, the deluge of information being thrown at them is increasing. Keeping up is a challenge as its estimated that in most organizations the volume of data is expanding by 35 to 50 percent every year.ii In the face of these competing demands, employees must consume increasing amounts of information and context. They also expect and demand more transparency, not only from their colleagues but also from the business processes and functions surrounding them. They expect a frictionless capability so that they can do their jobs faster. But while the number of different roles that need to leverage
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information has increased, the need for employees to share their data has also exploded. The result: the information technologies that have been implemented have forced users to gure out for themselves how to share and distribute information.
with colleagues. Each new channel has allowed organic growth of collaborative interaction between users. While each of the channels is exible enough on its own, the ad hoc nature limits the ability of any channel to grow into a tool that serves all facets of collaboration.
Embedding socialdriven collaboration into the business process

The problem within enterprises has never been a lack of communication. If anything, theres been a plethora of methods at varying degrees of maturity, each providing a needed element to employees efforts to share information. From e-mail to videoconferencing to instant messaging to Twitter, employees can always nd a way to communicate
Relationship Management platform, now allow companies to connect collaboration tools into their ERP and CRM packages. In addition, Salesforce.com has integrated its Chatter collaboration tool into its PaaS and SaaS applications. Some packaged-software developers Collaboration platform Jive allows are already adding these new companies to layer collaboration Nor has there been a lack of effort at capabilities to their applications. SAP, on top of specic tasks, such collaboration. Companies have spent with its Jam tool (including elements as software development. The millions on tools, but the outcomes of its StreamWork collaboration ultimate result: embedded channels and benets have hit their limit. platform), and Oracle, with its Social combining search, knowledge To move forward from this impasse, enterprises must move beyond tools and integrate social-driven collaboration into the business process. For example, adding the ability to comment, instant message, or follow a product through its activity stream within an order fulllment application promotes a free-owing exchange of ideas otherwise absent within a
distributed supply chain. It facilitates dialogue and education, enabling colleagues and business partners to easily share knowledge and learning. This simple concept needs to be writ large across the enterprise.
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management, workow, and collaboration, which deliver the prized ability to help users more easily and effectively do their jobs. By tying the integrated collaboration experience to business processes, disparate channels evolve from separate applications into a single user experience, one not only easier to use but also better at retaining exchanged information. For example, startup Clearspire is
reimaging how a law rm is built. It has created its own cloud-based platform that embeds the social and collaboration efforts needed between lawyers and their clients, into the processes. Matter diaries, budgets, and task applications are shared seamlessly with those that have access, allowing lawyers and clients to work on their cases collaboratively from any location. The collaboration technology isnt layered onto the process; it has become the process.iii
Even more importantly, businesses can benet from more effective business processesconducted more quickly, with stronger outcomes and more transparency. By leveraging the insight of appropriate subjectmatter experts (who can now answer questions once rather than repeatedly), employees can increase cycle and response times, while making better decisions. Enterprises can now rely on better insight and expertiseas well as consistency in areas such as sales and marketing.
contacts. Integrated functionality delivers more of what a user is trying to accomplish with any given task.
Adoption: bigger is better
tying the integrated collaboration By experience to business processes, disparate channels evolve from separate applications into a single user experience.
The more people who use a collaboration tool, the more benet everyone derives. However, just making a tool available doesnt mean it will get adopted. If an enterprise focuses on creating a tool solely designed to increase From the standpoint of individual overall company productivity, users, such integrated systems that tool wont necessarily make deliver a richer experience. the employees life any easier. Employees frustration at not being (Remember the initial resistance able to nd the right information, or to CRM tools among salespeople?) having to use multiple applications When enterprises focus on the or methods to do so, will decrease. process without accommodating At the same time, the accuracy the employee, adoption will lag. of the information they get will If the usefulness isnt obvious, increase thanks to better context and businesses will never see any ROI.
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In the short term, job-centric enablement will tie communication and collaboration to specic activities in order to increase their velocity and efficiency and make employees jobs easier. Done right, this will both entice and delight employees, spurring adoption and productivity gains for the most vital tasks within a company. We recommend the following adoption model. Stop thinking about yesterdays siloed collaboration channels that relied on ad hoc usage and general productivity gains. Start with a targeted, user-centric model that supports specic work activities; think about how you would develop such an application if you were rolling it out to customers rather than employeesthat is, make it as enticing and easy to use as possible. Drive more job-specic usage and derive specic productivity gains within specic tasks. In one example from a Salesforce.com customer, the vice president of IT at Enterasys logged into Chatter and noticed that a salesperson was targeting a lower-level prospect at a company where the VP of IT employee knew the CIO. The VP connected the two, and the salesperson closed the deal.iv This requires looking at two goals: one short-term, the other long-term. In the long term, rising adoption feeds enterprise productivity. Leadership can have better insight into teams, groups, processes, and ultimately the entire enterprises activities. The potential is a virtuous circle in which individual activities become more efficient, thus triggering overall gains across the enterprise. By moving from ad hoc to business-centric usage, enterprises can better instrument and measure how collaboration helps people do their jobs, as opposed to the general,
sometimes inaccurate, estimates of productivity boosts that enterprises must render today. Collaboration channels that are more process-specic will also lead to more easily measurable benets, which in turn can be analyzed and optimized. Such channels also create an opportunity to make data-driven decisions about user productivity, informing both individual and workforce performance assessments. For example, it may be hard to measure the value of giving technical-support agents the ability to chat through text or video directly with higher-tier support staff. But by tying the collaboration tools directly to the trouble-ticket process, you can more easily measure its effectiveness. Comparing rates of ticket closures with and without the use of chat
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sessions, companies can see whether theres an improvement that ties directly back to cost savings. Once the process is instrumented and quantied, an enterprise can use the data to reconsider how it can further optimize the dissemination of such calls.
this new paradigm, employees will be collaborating with objects too. First, collaboration becomes a partnership between the business and IT. Currently, it sits squarely under the purview of the CIO, who supports the channels. While IT will still own the channels, how employees collaborate will be the purview of the business, driven by the needs of the business processes. As part of this cultural shift, ITs role will change. It must provide a flexible platform that will allow the business to integrate the collaboration channels it needs into the applications it uses. Because the requirements will differ within each line of business, one-size-fits-all collaboration tools will no longer suffice. IT must partner with the business, taking a
Instilling a collaborative culture

Embedding collaboration requires a cultural shift within the enterprise to change the way it looks at both its workers and its business processes. It involves new ways of thinking about issues within and beyond technology, including new roles and responsibilities, for IT, for business leaders, and for employees across the enterprise. It will also redefine whoand now, whatpeople collaborate with. In
business-centric view and actively understanding the business processes. The technologies must work for the process, rather than the other way around. There may still be separate channels for search, knowledge management, and workflow, but IT should work to either minimize fragmented use within the enterprise or figure out how to deploy them as part of a highly flexible collaboration platform.
Enterprises will also need to begin looking at ways to automate sharing. Employees are willing to be more transparent, but taking the time to share information at each step of a process can quickly become a burden, especially when information must be distributed among large groups. But sharing is not limited to people; social metaphors can also be applied to objects. For example, the new GEnx jet enginecurrently
the requirements will differ Because within each line of business, one-sizets-all collaboration tools will no longer suffice. IT must partner with the business, taking a business-centric view and actively understanding the business processes.
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Your 100-day plan

In 100 days, redefine your collaboration strategy; prioritize based on business process enablement.
Catalog the tools that are currently being used (supported and unsupported) to collaborate across the organization. Determine a set of quantiable business metrics to measure the success of your collaboration services architecture. Identify and prioritize business processes where increased productivity through collaboration will drive the most value. Deploy collaboration to the highest-priority processes to create demand for additional deployments. Review and implement preliminary incentives for behaviors, evaluations, and personal metrics to encourage collaboration.
a component of Boeings new 787 Dreamlinerhas the ability to provide newsfeeds to which service teams can subscribe. Allowing the engine itself to automatically share its status allows service teams to more easily maintain it, reducing cost and increasing its lifespan. The idea of connecting a machine to a social network is really exciting, says GEs CMO, Beth Comstock. Social will help us deliver a better engine than ever before. v
and nd the right answers to their questions directly within the context of their work, theyll quickly become smarter, more responsive, and more productive. It will be clear whos participating and contributing, just as it is on social-media sites today, and it will be easy for employees to reach out for information. But thats just the start of whats possible. As part of the broader movement to consolidate siloed IT capabilities into business processes, we expect to see deeper and more widespread convergence of search and knowledge-management activities that complement collaboration: effectively funneling and ltering large amounts of information to employees. The underlying challenge is to create a user experience that will help employees get the information they need when they need it. The
What collaboration will look like soon

The new face of collaboration will show up rst as social interactions are integrated into business processes. When employees are able to chat, share information, identify specialists, get recommendations,
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collaboration platform will capture insights, allowing employees to search an enterprises collective knowledge from within the platform. Accenture believes that enterprises that take advantage of converged collaboration have an opportunity to see signicant productivity gains. By enabling employees to work smarter, they are more aware of important context for their decisions and actions. Workers will be more likely to identify problems sooner, reliably nd the xes they need, and share the solutions with the right people. Further, we expect to see a network effect in which increasingly collaborative employees create increasingly productive organizations. As enterprises quantify their collaboration efforts, they will reveal a more complete picture of how their employees and their business
processes actually workand theyll be able to make them even more efficient going forward.
This time next year

In 365 days, implement your new strategy to weave the collaboration platform into the highest-priority business processes.
Update your strategy with best practices established in early adopter industries. Use lessons learned from current implementations and industry best practices to build your collaboration services architecture. Establish a cross-functional team to design and evaluate user experiences of the collaboration services architecture. Leverage IT and the business to embed collaboration services into a prioritized list of business processes. Measure the business impact of your initial deployments to drive demand among other business units.
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Software-Dened Networking Virtualizations last mile
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Trend 5. Software-Defined Networking
Software-Dened Networking
With virtualization investments already paying off in servers and starting to pay off in storage, businesses must turn their attention to virtualizing the network in order to extend the life of their infrastructure and reap the full value of their virtualization investments. Like other virtualization technologies, softwaredened networking (SDN) has the ability to radically change the exibility with which businesses and IT operate. You may think of networking as a low-level technology, but this aspect of it has the ability to transform enterprises. With SDN, businesses can nally realize the vision of a dynamic enterprise.
Businesses have invested a lot in all phases of virtualization. Those investments were certainly worthwhile, but they have focused primarily on reducing costs. The virtualization effort has resulted in more efficient infrastructures, but it has not contributed to helping the business become more dynamic or more agile. The network, the foundation of the data center and the enterprise, has remained an untapped opportunity because theres been no easy way to make it dynamicuntil now. When enterprises unlock agility in their data center network using whats known as software-dened networking (SDN), they have the potential to create a dynamic enterprise. In a dynamic enterprise, businesses can deploy new projects quickly and determine just as quickly whether they are successful or not. Enterprises are halfway toward this
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goal of agilitythey currently use virtualization to spin up servers and storage without having to procure more hardware, and then spin them down again when projects end or fail to meet expectations. SDN involves decoupling hardware from software for a higher degree of exibility. By uncoupling the hardware, SDN essentially eliminates the need for applications to understand the internal workings of the routers and switches that connect multiple networks. Software, not hardware, creates the connections that stitch together multiple networks. Suddenly, companies can recongure the connectivity of systems without changing their physical characteristics. This is a radical new way of looking at the network. To the business, SDN
is a key technology for delivering exibility and agilitya vital component in differentiating the company. In a world that demands constant change, SDN enables IT to unleash the power of virtualization and makes it easier to move to the cloud. Put simply, SDN makes it easier for enterprises to handle change, and change is an imperative for a digital business.
Virtualization off to a good start

To better understand the potential of SDN, lets step back and look at the virtues of virtualization for the data center. Virtualization has been a boon to businesses and governments; for example, the U.S. government saves nearly 20 percent of its annual IT budget through virtualization.i These savings enable businesses to do
more while spending less in the data center. Server virtualization spurs consolidation; reduces the associated costs of hardware, space, power, and cooling; and increases the ability to run applications anywhere. It helps improve availability and reliability, by making both disaster recovery and business continuity more exible than ever before. Done well, it helps reduce the businesss dependence on new hardware (and alleviates associated procurement and installation delays), lets IT automate server provisioning,
and streamlines the overall application deployment process. On a grander scale, virtualization lets businesses take advantage of cloud computing, SaaS, and IaaS opportunitiesthat is, the ability to move processes and services to virtualized cloud environments. For instance, consider the ability of a retailer to easily add computing capacity to its e-commerce system starting on Black Friday and continuing through the holiday
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The software-dened network, combined with existing virtual infrastructure, is a radical step toward enterprise exibility.
shopping season, or the ability of a company to use Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure to run a pilot project without actually procuring servers internally. Whether used for longterm offloading of processes or shortterm computing needs, virtualization brings an unprecedented level of exibility. Storage virtualization, with offerings from VMware, NetApp, and others, is knocking down the barriers between computing and storage. Once data
is decoupled from specic storage devices and protocols, it is easier to access and manage. And desktop virtualization has made the dream of centralized management come true, while still delivering the functionality that users demand. Businesses have deployed many forms of virtualization, and most of those deployments have been widely successful. But crucially, enterprises are still locked down by the network. The one benet they seekbecoming
more agileis still missing. That between them are still static and missing piece is the dynamic network. brittle. SDN frees applications from having to maintain knowledge of the changing network. While businesses have derived much exibility from virtualization, SDN helps them handle the increasing complexity of moving parts in a dynamic data center. Enter SDN. The software-dened network, combined with existing What comes of decoupling the virtual infrastructure, is a radical step control of the network from the toward enterprise exibility. physical network? Remember the savings that server virtualization Until recently, the network has brought? Instead of having to withstood the onslaught of procure and install a server and virtualization (the unrelated concept then deploy the applications on it, of virtualized local area networks a technician (or another reasonably notwithstanding). Having virtualized experienced person taking advantage all the disparate pieces of the data of self-service provisioning) spun center, the remaining task is to up a new virtual machine and the make the connections between application was available. Now, them dynamically congurable. multiply that simplicity across an The data centers resources may be entire network. At eBay, according dynamic, but the communications to JC Martin, who oversees the data
Unleashing the full potential of dynamic networks
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center infrastructure for eBays marketplace businesses, Were allowing our people to create virtual environments much like they used to create complete physical networking environmentsexcept they can do it in minutes. ii But SDN encompasses more than just the ability to program and manage data center networking activities. It enables the wholesale abstraction of the network layer, in order to take advantage of any network infrastructure. This encompasses not just the private cloud in the data center but also the ability to move
data into hybrid cloud deployments. SDN is the last step in making the promise of the cloud and network interoperability come to fruition.
SDN: the zenith of interoperability

Enterprises have already begun to pay attention to what SDN can deliver. IDC estimated in December 2012 that the worldwide SDN market would grow from $360 million in 2013 to $3.7 billion by 2016. iii SDN provides the foundation for the dynamic enterprise because it
accommodates ongoing exibility. Its benets are tangible. One of the hardest aspects of IT is connecting the ow of external data across disparate networks depending on business needs. (How many mergers have failed because of the inability to integrate IT systems?)
networks simplify the connectivity aspect of these conguration changes. By eliminating the need to recongure the physical network, SDN delivers a new zenith of network interoperability.
It makes a variety of capabilities more accessible to more enterprises. Reconguring the network is Consider the scenario of deploying complex, time-consuming, and labor- a SaaS-based CRM system. Using intensive because it requires focusing SaaS, or public cloud technology, on dedicated network hardware, makes it easy to get the system up such as routers and switches. By and running quickly; to be truly moving beyond the hardware into useful, though, the system must still software, in which changes can connect to other internal systems. To be programmed easily, dynamic link inventory to customers, it must
eliminating the need to recongure the physical network, By SDN delivers a new zenith of network interoperability.
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rigidity of the network takes its toll, because every time The you touch the network, you have to ensure that every link of connectivity works properly.
connect to your ERPs inventory system. To grasp what customers are saying about your product, it must connect to social-media applications. All this connectivity involves reconguring the network so that the data ows appropriately. SDN provides the foundation for cloud exibilitychanges associated with swapping out one cloud provider for another are more easily isolated. The challenge continues when any of these applications has to be upgraded. It isnt as easy as turning on new hardware and powering down the old. You have to migrate the data and services properly, and then test to make sure that they work on the upgraded system. Here, too, the rigidity of the network takes its toll, because every time you touch the network, you have to ensure that every link of connectivity works properly. It doesnt even have to be a question of application renewal every time you want to re up a new cloud application, you have to connect it to your data center, whether for backup or data sharing or simply creating a hybrid cloud. Without updating your network, youre throwing up your own roadblock every time you want to deploy a new service, upgrade an old system, improve a workow, enhance an operationessentially, anytime you want to employ innovation to gain an advantage. Its hard enough outmaneuvering the competition without diminishing your capabilities. Software-dened networking instead unleashes those capabilities. startups have recognized the value of SDN and are offering options. In addition to opening up access to the software capabilities in its existing products, Cisco Systems purchased SDN startup Cariden at the end of 2012 for $141 million and funded spin-in company Insiemi, created by several Cisco engineers, earlier in the year with a $100 million investment. Meanwhile, VMware entered the market by purchasing Nicira for $1.26 billion as part of its overall virtualization strategy. Niciras founders created the open-source OpenFlow network protocol, a key part of many SDN efforts.
The SDN landscape

Who will lead you to the agility of SDN? Not surprisingly, both traditional networking providers and
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virtualization creates a network Network in the software realm, all the way down to virtual switches and routers. This frees applications from the need to understand the internal intricacies of the physical network.
As frequently happens with emergent technology, companies generate different approaches; in the case of SDN, some tout network programmability, while others promote network virtualization. Whats the difference? Network virtualization creates a network in the software realm, all the way down to virtual switches and routers. This frees applications from the need to understand the internal intricacies of the physical network. Network programmability involves centralizing control of the routers and switches in order to recongure them as
infrastructure changes. Which path is better? Thats for companies themselves to determine. The result will be similar to other technology battles in the past: both will offer value and viability, and they will coexist depending on circumstances (think Java versus Microsofts .NET in application development). One early adopter of SDN is eBay, which is currently using a solution from Nicira inside the data centers serving its online marketplaces. eBay uses Nicira in conjunction with OpenStack, an open-source platform
for building cloud services. According to eBay executives, the company also uses the two technologies to let workers create virtual networks for running internal applications. eBays OpenStack cloud is still limiteda few thousand machines supporting a couple hundred projectsbut it is designed to provide a template for how the company will roll out the capabilities more broadly in the future.iv
Soon, companies may be able to take advantage of this fast ramp-up of networks even before they invest in SDN themselves. Cloud services provider Rackspace, a competitor to Amazon, is starting to use Nicirabased virtual networking services with clients that seek to set up cloud-based networks quickly v and efficiently.
Nicira is not alone by any means. Other startups, such as ADARA SDN allows eBay to be innovative Networks, Big Switch Networks, faster. Not only can eBays developers ConteXtream, Embrane, Plexxi, and create and test new network-based Vello Systems, are hanging their products and services faster, but eBay hopes on the OpenFlow protocol. can deploy those services faster. An Many established network providers added benet: because SDN allows have aligned their capabilities to for better utilization of current OpenFlow as well, while still offering resources, companies can save proprietary APIs. money on new hardware and energy costs (for more on this capability, see Other early adopters are starting the section on network optimization). to come forward, too. Although Big Switch Networks lists Fidelity
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Investments and Goldman Sachs as customers, neither is saying just how extensively its using the technology. The ability to move money fast and make transactions faster has always enticed the nancial services industry, which can increase revenue through faster trades. The industry also depends on high reliability from its networks. The ability to make their networks more efficient makes them strong contenders for SDNs capabilities. Picking the winners in this market is still anyones guess. Established vendors are facing the typical challenge of how to embrace a new technology without cannibalizing their existing products. New companies relying on open-source advances face a different challenge: how do you provide value while waiting for that industry standard to gel? The standardization process
moves notoriously slowly. Thats why the market is seeing fragmentation to date. No single player or approach meets the traditional data centers needs for SDN. Companies should prepare for an extensive consolidation and acquisition cycle over the next 12 to 18 months.
What enterprises can expect from SDN
According to Technology Business Researchs Scott Dennehy, Customer adoption of SDN will happen quicker Lest it sound too good to be true, at the SMB level, as these customers SDN is complex because of all that will be attracted to SDNs promise it touches. It requires tools and of networks that are cheap, easy to vi frameworks that are still developing. deploy and simple to maintain. As The interim alternative of doing it with server virtualization, SMBs will yourself is time-consuming and lead the way not only in the search expensive. Theres a difference for agility but also from an incredible between virtualizing your data focus on affordability. Watching center and virtualizing your entire which technologies benet SMBs network. But on the former scale, the never hurts enterprises. benets are too tangible to ignore.
Although SDN ushers in the foundation for a highly dynamic enterprise, its important to note that a high degree of dynamism is anathema to most businesses. They dont want things dynamicthey want them stable. Change too often equates to something breaking. Nobodynot the business and not ITwants that. This transition proves once again that sometimes the hardest challenge in technology is not changing the systems but changing the people that run them.
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But for both enterprises and SMBs, this is an opportunity to take the advantages and cost savings theyve derived from server and storage virtualization and apply them to the data center. Consider the savings from network hardware investments, management, and upgrades. Best of all, agility comes along for the ride. More than ever before, SDN will deliver the responsiveness that businesses have been demanding from IT for yearsthe ability to respond quickly, be proactive in integration, and help ratchet up competitive advantage. With SDN, companies demanding innovation from IT and their business units will now have a foundation to build upon, one that allows them to try new projects with less risk, and respond faster to those that promise benecial outcomes.
Your 100-day plan

In 100 days, create an SDN mandate that frames value to the business and the impact on IT.
Assign a champion responsible for SDN trends and technologies. Build an initial understanding of the state of SDN. Establish a test kitchen environment and begin to bring SDN technologies in-house for evaluation.
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This time next year

In 365 days, create an SDN strategy defining the business case and the implementation approach.
Prioritize the areas where SDN will have the largest business impact. Create a road map for the SDN deployment plan. Prepare the aggregate SDN business case that combines benets from network agility and cost savings from network optimization. Assess IT organizational skill with respect to SDN and train or recruit to ll the gaps. Develop a network transformation plan to embed SDN into the corporate architecture.
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Sidebar: Network Optimization
Beyond the exibility that SDN provides to the enterprise data center are its benets for the network as a whole. It isnt for the faint of heartno true optimization solutions currently exist, so for now companies will need to build their own solutions. But consider the advantages that businesses could derive from highly optimized deployments of data. These include specialized routing for specic content, such as video for special eventsstockholders meetings, say, or product announcements. IP Infusion is using SDN-based networking gear from Broadcom along with OpenFlow technology to improve the quality of service for i mobile video applications.
Google has used OpenFlow technology to boost utilization on its internal network. Currently, most companies get only 30 to 40 percent utilization of their networks, but thanks to the programmability of SDN, Google executives anticipate that soon they will approach 100 percent ii utilization of the company network. Like driving up server utilization in the data center, more effective use of the network will unlock huge cost savings. Imagine doubling the amount of available bandwidth doubling the pipewithout doubling your infrastructure. Verizon anticipates using SDN to relieve loads on individual
data centers to redirect traffic to other, less-utilized data centers in different time zones. It is also looking at SDN to solve another current problem: the need to lter content based on parental controls. Currently, Verizon must send all traffic through a network ltering device whether it needs to be ltered or not. With SDN, it would be able to route content that needed to be ltered for specic customers (for example, parents with underage children) through a different data center, offloading other networks and creating more iii throughput efficiency. If those scenarios arent enticing, consider the ability to replace
wholesale hands-on maintenance of the infrastructure, as well as the ability to unlock latent value in your network. SDN has the ability, beyond building more resilient systems, to help create more automated systems. Setting up a network is still mostly a manual task, one that involves change every time the business requests something new, from SaaS to upgrades. By introducing programmability into the equation, SDN brings more and costs less. Few technologies can offer that.
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Active Defense Adapting cyberdefenses to the threat
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Trend 6. Active Defense
Active Defense
Despite an increasing focus on securing the digital business, IT departments struggle to keep pace with recent advances in security technology. Enterprises know that endpoint security is not enough, but the move to active defenserisk-based approaches to security management, analytics-driven event detection, and reex-like incident responseisnt yet happening on a broad scale. Although these technologies are maturing rapidly and communities are forming to expose risks, the biggest barrier is slow adoption of solutions that already exist. ITs core challenge: get current with best practices in security while getting smarter about the new active-defense possibilities and getting real about the journey ahead.
Just because your car passes its emissions test each year doesnt mean youre doing great things to slow global warming. Nor are you immune to burglary just because you put timers on the lights in your home before you leave for vacation. Its much the same story with organizations that are content to work down their security checklists at regular intervals. Perimeter defense activated? Check. Password update routines in place? Check. Employees smartphones shut down remotely in case of theft? Check.. Payment Card Industry Audit with only minor ndings? Check. Clearly, it feels good to know that everything appears to be taken care of. But the truth is that when it comes to data security, cybersecurity, network securityjust about any kind of corporate information
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securitymany enterprises can do much more to address the risks that their organizations face. The burden does not rest solely on the IT departments shoulders. The risks incurred are business risksthe harm to intellectual capital when sensitive data is compromised, the operational risk when business is disrupted, the reputation risk when personally identiable consumer information is stolen, and of course the increasing likelihood of hefty penalties when data security regulations are violated. None of these risks goes away unless business leaders assume responsibility for IT security too. Although most companies certainly have invested substantially in IT security, they are still not taking full advantage of the maturing tools and services now available to help
blunt todays attacks and plug the many entry points that highly skilled attackers can now exploit. The information security landscape has become an intimidating and confusing place. Things are harder to keep in order: the IT attack surface keeps expanding across more devices, more systems, more people, more partners, and broader infrastructure. Extensions to the enterprisethink cloud and mobilityhave created new places for hackers to probe. Threat levels are increasing as sophisticated, targeted forms of cybercrime emerge. Governments and organized crime groups are on the lists of hackers, while hacktivists and lone wolves are becoming more dangerous because they are beneting from the established tactics and techniques of these organized groups. And legacy systems that were never designed
for a connected world have been brought online, opening up further weak points.i Yet while some alert enterprises are striving to stay abreast of new advances in security, many otherstoo manyare now further behind than they were a year ago. Compliance has become the comfort zone, but the security model based on adherence to standards is awedlargely as a consequence of rapid innovation in IT. Standards
simply cant evolve fast enough to keep pace. Essentially, enterprises default mode is perimeter protection when it should be proactive probing, and isolationism when it should be integration. Enterprises must shift their thinking and begin to expect that 3 a.m. call about a security breach. As a matter of urgency, they have to close the widening gap between their practices and current best practicesthey need to undertake regular actions such
has become the comfort Compliance zone, but the security model based on adherence to standards is awedlargely as a consequence of rapid innovation in IT. Standards simply cant evolve fast enough to keep pace.
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as deploying reex-like responses to security threats in their midst and leveraging analytics to create a second line of defense around data and services. And on top of that, their IT leaders need to keep eyes and ears open for the next round of advancements, the better to help their organizations prepare more creative and more agile responses and to get more insight into attack proles.
Managing the risks when attackers do get through

In the past, IT has architected everything around the idea of keeping the bad guys out. Today, though, optimal IT security is not about complete prevention; its about recognizing that attackers will get through. In fact, its no longer just a matter of discovering that someone is trying to penetrate your rewall; its about acknowledging
that advanced persistent threats (APTs) have already penetrated your organization, often avoiding your perimeter altogether. Few enterprises are truly ready to deal with that alarming reality. To minimize the damage when attackers have penetrated, IT groups must nd out how, where, and when they did so. That means that ITs security professionals, working hand in glove with the relevant business staff, must design and deploy processes and systems that allow them to expect and monitor security compromises in the rst place and react to them before the attackers can begin to wreak havoc. This calls for new levels of awarenesskeeping abreast of the state of play of threat actors in generaland for new ways to act on what is being learned in the context
of whats known about the breaches that are occurring. In doing so, IT groups and their business colleagues shift from compliance to action; specically, they put the emphasis on managing risk, matching their responses to the magnitude of the risks posed to the business. Essentially, they are able to think like the enemy at all times. The keys to mastering risk and guring out the big security picture for your enterprise are in understanding the businesses processes and the strategic assets that youre trying to protect. (If you cant gure out what should be happening, its hard to say when someone is doing something wrong.) A manufacturer, for instance, might instrument and protect the specications for a critical engineering component in order to detect access anomalies
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Leading organizations will understand the business consequences of inevitable data leaks and respond proportionally; they get the idea that different levels of attacks require different speed, scale, and types of responses.
and to require greater levels of authentication in the event of unusual accesssay, an employee who is supposed to be on vacation who is downloading complete specications. Automation can play a big role here. Ideally, IT should be able to deploy security solutions and architectures that will, like human reexes, respond instinctively to the growing speed, scale, and variety of attacks. The increasing attack surface supports the case for automated capabilities that detect, assess, and respond to
threats immediately. For instance, in the case of the manufacturer mentioned earlier, the system might automatically lock the engineering database for a period of time and also alert the security team. Its important to restate that leading organizations will understand the business consequences of inevitable data leaks and respond proportionally; they get the idea that different levels of attacks require different speed, scale, and types of responses. A cascade of responses might, for example, involve the
immediate shutdown of one portion of a network coupled with active monitoring, which, if it detects that the threat is large or moving fast, shuts down other parts of the network. Of course, determining the business consequences isnt easy; the organizations that succeed at it know that their security organizations and the business must work together to assess and prioritize the risk.
data to visualization of behaviors and anomalies. To better understand their risks and to detect attacks, leading security organizations will turn increasingly to data platform technologies technologies that provide access to and aggregation of data via services. If they are building the system themselves, IT groups are very likely to use Hadoop or Splunk; otherwise, they may turn to a solution such as NetWitness, which is designed to provide enterprises with a precise and actionable understanding of everything happening on their networks. The data platform, and accompanying analytical approaches, allows security to handle large volumes of fast-changing data orders of magnitude greater in scale than traditional log analysis. It will
Putting in place a second line of defense

To cope with these new higher-order security challenges, IT leaders must develop a second line of defense by leveraging new data platform concepts to design, implement, and run systems that shift the security emphasis from monitoring to understanding; from collection of
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also make it easier to harness new forms of data from the unstructured world, opening up fresh opportunities for security analysis. These platforms will help organizations acquire a new understanding of their risk landscapes, explore their data in new ways, and create more timely detection and responses to improve the condence of the business. In one example, DARPAs Active Authentication program is exploring new ways to authenticate users through their cognitive footprint. ii Gathering and analyzing large amounts of data on your user behavior creates a picture of the ways you use your computerthe ways you move your mouse or the language you use in documents, for instance. Eventually, cognitive footprint software will help your organizations security systems to determine that the person who
signed into your computer really is you. In another instance, a data platform might assist in making realtime decisions about who is allowed access to a patients electronic medical record, based on the patients history of care.
The sharp edge of the latest security thinking

It would be wonderful if these kinds of security approaches were being practiced regularly today by IT departments in every industry. IT departments in many organizations have made big strides in a lot of areas, as we noted in Accentures Technology Vision 2012. But there is much more to be done. IT leaders need to continue looking ahead, familiarizing themselves with security technologies that
are starting to push conventional security boundaries. Unsurprisingly, over the last 12 months many of the emerging security techniques have revolved around data, albeit in markedly different ways than conventional security approaches. Some of the focus is shifting from studying your systems to studying the people using themthat is, getting to know your intended users and your hackers alike. Even more interestingly, some new systems are geared to keeping hackers from knowing you.
Fingerprinting your enemies

New technology developments are making it easier to identify whos attacking you. Essentially, they enable security professionals to get closer and closer to potential attackers in the wildhelping them identify their tactics, techniques, and procedures earlier and track down signs of compromised security before damage can be done.
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Similarly, enterprise architectures are evolving rapidly to include much more capable identity and access management (I&AM) systems. Authentication and authorization technology is becoming increasingly adaptive, context-aware, and riskbased. More and more of the I&AM systems are being strengthened with analytics tools that work increasingly with growing sets of data unstructured as well as structured. And risk proles are being used more and more as trust anchors for sensitive transactions, based on behavioral and environmental context. Nok Nok Labs, the new venture from PGP cofounder Phillip Dunkelberger, is a good example of a company helping to simplify strong authentication.iii Because the machines that surround us use are delivered with security embedded
whether they are smartphones, tablets, or laptop computersthe Nok Nok Labs technology enables companies to recognize these strong authentication capabilities and to leverage them to deliver a more secure experience appropriate to the risk of the transaction or the identity of the user. Todays usage patterns can also help build smart proles of users and their computing habits. The idea is that authentication is now less a simple are you who you say you arebased on a simple password, sayand more a way of establishing when authorized access is out of character relative to a users normal behavior. For instance, a Texas-based engineer who regularly accesses important design data for a product might be asked for an additional level of authentication when he tries to access that data while on a
and authorization Authentication technology is becoming increasingly
adaptive, context-aware, and risk based.
business trip to India. Or a customer service representative with access to customer records might be prompted for additional authorization if she suddenly attempts a bulk download of the whole database. At the same time, a new battlefront is opening up in the eld of hacker identication. Security specialists such as CrowdStrike are developing powerful capabilities in enterprise adversary assessment.iv CrowdStrikes services help reveal
existing compromised systems while providing counterintelligence and recommendations to help prevent future targeted attacks. Through hunting operations, including hostbased detection, threat-specic network analysis, and victim threat proling, the services identify adversaries and nd out what they are after. Other providers, such as Mykonos Software, specialize in ngerprinting hackers equipment
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to identify the machine delivering a script intended to hack a website. Mykonoss tools can also create a prole of the attacker; that prole can then be shared within an industry or within a community of IT security professionals. To our earlier point about proportional responses: ngerprinting in this way allows the defender to get a better sense of the actual threatwho is attacking us and what they are afterand then to properly evaluate it in terms of its risk to the business and mount an
appropriate response to thwart the attack. For instance, after detecting a potential attack, the system might prompt for higher authentication in the middle of a session to thwart a machine-based attack, while throttling bandwidth to the system to reduce impact on other resources. This kind of approach would not be too costly in terms of unnecessary system shutdowns, say, but it would be enough to raise the bar for the attacker.
and making it easier for users to do the right thing

At the same time, there is growing acceptance of the idea that better usability can be a powerful mechanism for increasing security effectivenessconsider a biometric reader checking your ngerprint versus having to remember a complex password. By specically designing for security, an enterprise can increase compliance with security protocols by making it easier for users to do the right thing than to create a clever workaround. The key is to understand how people want to use the system and what theyre trying to accomplish. One example: security experts at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam have designed ways to deploy baggage-screening technologies to upgrade security while improving the customer
experience at the same timea win for everyone. v Research has demonstrated that system design can greatly inuence a users ability to make appropriate security decisions. At the Georgia Institute of Technology, researchers have studied two persistent problems: user authentication and e-mail encryption.vi They described two successful design cases that made it easy for users to achieve their desired security goals, and two awed ones that made it difficult for even very motivated users to operate securely. Guidelines for more usable security already existGeorgia Tech researchers draw on prior work from inuential scientist Ka-Ping Yee. The guidelines include factors such as the following: the path of least resistance (matching the most comfortable
specically designing for security, an By enterprise can increase compliance with security protocols by making it easier for users to do the right thing than to create a clever workaround. The key is to understand how people want to use the system and what theyre trying to accomplish.
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way to perform tasks with the least granting of authority), active authorization (meaning the granting of authority to others in accordance with user actions indicating consent), revocability (offering the user ways to reduce others authority to access that users resources), identiability (presenting objects and actions using distinguishable, truthful appearances), and foresight (that is, indicating clearly the consequences of decisions that the user is expected
to make). Collectively, these factors help designers focus on making it easy for users to do the right thing most of the time.
Fooling enemies more of the time...

In parallel, there is intense activityand plenty of venturecapital fundinggoing into active defense; that is, into systems that actually engage the enemy with the
objectives of making it more difficult, more expensive, and less protable to do their work. (Think of it as the cyber equivalent of a safebox thats full of nothing but costume jewelry, perhaps, or stacks of fake $50 bills in a folder in an office bureau, for instance.) The systems being developed range from technologies that signal to the intruder that he is being tracked to others that deceive him with electronic pollution cyber smokescreens, if you like. Its important to point out that the emerging developments owe a lot to the momentum seen in several foundation technologies. More granular and more exible levels of system control are possible because of rapid progress with software-dened networking (SDN) and because of the advances in virtualization across the IT landscape.
Misinformation and misdirection systems hold some of the greatest promise. Allure Security Technology is one start-up that is developing decoy documents to defend against data loss, essentially fronting bogus les that may cause damage to the systems of the hacker trying to get at them. The real kicker: as these tools become commonplace, they force attackers to consider the possibility that the les are bogus, and thus to question whether an intrusion attempt is worthwhile.vii Another software provider DataSofthas created what it calls its Network Obfuscation and Virtualized Anti-Reconnaissance System (Nova)a tool developed to detect network-based reconnaissance efforts and to deny the attacker access to real network data while providing false information regarding the number and types of systems
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viii connected to the network. Nova is designed to spoof network data to attackers, thus revealing their intentions. Its autonomous agents combine lightweight virtualization, attacker classication, dynamic rerouting for asset protection, and an array of mechanisms for sending false information to attackers.
Such honey pots lure attackers to what appear to be more promising targets. The core ideas have been around for at least a decade, but the underlying technologies are pushing these approaches further, spurred by the proliferation of security threats in general.ix One example: besides developing tools that can ngerprint attackers, Mykonos Software has developed deceptive honey pots to detect attackers without generating false positives. Its
Web Intrusion Prevention System inserts instrumentation into a Web application to create an invisible mineeld throughout. The honey pots allow you to detect attackers while theyre still snooping but before they begin to do damage. Attackers are detected when they manipulate the honey pot parts of the application. So, because attackers are manipulating code that has nothing to do with your website or Web application, you know with absolute certainty that an attack is in progress.
as a way to compartmentalize risks by setting up virtual environments, making it much more difficult for attackers to see the contours of what theyre trying to access. Putting it in IT security terms, virtualization gives the organization more control over, and more agility in, how it responds to attacks. The Nova system referred to earlier uses large arrays of virtual machines to detect and prevent hostile
reconnaissance. Another provider, Invincea, relies on virtualization to secure your network against employee mistakes by protecting the x employee from all untrusted content. Invinceas technology is all about containment: it takes the most highly targeted applications in your network (the browser, PDF reader, Office suite, zip les, executables) and seamlessly contains them in a virtualized environment. Every time the browser is opened, or any time an attachment
and preventing them from knowing you in the rst place

Sandboxing is another technique that is gaining a lot more attention, thanks largely to developments in virtualization. Think of sandboxing
of sandboxing as a way to Think compartmentalize risks by setting up virtual environments, making it much more difficult for attackers to see the contours of what theyre trying to access.
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comes from outside the network, Invincea creates a segregated environment for these applications to operate. That way, Invincea contains all malwarewhether zero-day or knownand prevents it from attacking the host OS as a pathway for breach and lateral movement in your network.
infrastructure is denied. In one recent experiment, Bromiums technology almost immediately reduced an attack surface from 1 million lines of codes to about 10,000 lines. xi
is no silver bullet technology that There IT leaders should be waiting for. There never will be. No one tool, no matter how capable, can handle the scope, scale, and complexity of the information security challenges of today and tomorrow.
The next natural step is toward what are being called moving target defenses (MTDs)systems that continuously blur the lines between At the same time, Bromium, another what is real and what is virtual. The security software start-up, is applying driver behind MTD is that static what it calls micro-virtualization environments enable adversaries to secure desktops, allowing to plan and execute attacks over untrustworthy desktop tasks to time. Essentially, MTD is a nonstop safely coexist with trusted enterprise version of musical chairs; as soon as applications and data. The technology your systems are truly virtualized, uses hardware-level isolation to stop they can be set to change all the even undetectable attacks without time. It is not simply a question of disrupting the user. It automatically, randomizing passwords; its about instantly, and invisibly hardwarerandomizing all the connections. That isolates each vulnerable Windows way, hackers can no longer simply task so that Windows cannot be hack in and wait for vulnerabilities modied and so that unauthorized to appear in users regular patterns. access to enterprise data or network More interesting still: hackers can
be redirected in many different misleading directions. MTD is still in its earliest stages, but we predict that it will gather momentum rapidly, especially as it converges with new developments in SDN. Theres at least one example of MTD in action, although its early days yet. The technology provided by JumpSoft, an MTD specialist, is designed to respond to disruptions to applications themselves and to any of the preceding layers in the
IT stack. JumpSoft uses MTD at the application layer in order to disguise and deect threats to the OS and network layer as well as at the hardware and system layer.
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Dont wait for the silver bullet

There is no silver bullet technology that IT leaders should be waiting for. There never will be. No one tool, no matter how capable, can handle
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IT must build up a concentration of force in IT security capabilities, but the security burden has to be shared by the organizations data professionals, by its traditional developers (remembering the need for user experiences that are designed for security), and by more and more categories of business users.
entirely unlikely that some of your organizations business leaders, burned by information security breaches, might make rash decisionsa knee-jerk response, perhapsto isolate parts of the organization in ways that could be detrimental to business effectiveness. The IT teams must anticipate and prepare answers for such a scenario. At the same time, IT leaders need to take a lesson from the world of prudent investment by developing portfolio-based approaches to securityapproaches that minimize the risks to the business by enabling responses to all kinds of attacks in all sorts of circumstances. The fundamental emphasis must be on fully understanding their risk proles and the type of integrated picture that can help them better manage those risks.
Putting a plan into action

It is also vital to have the specialty skills to be able to mount effective defenses. A challenge for many IT leaders is that such specialists are in short supply, partly because many are being hired by the security software vendors. So it is incumbent on every IT leader to budget for nding, competing for, hiring, and retaining the new breed of IT security professionals. Of course, the skills issue extends far beyond the IT security staffs cubicles. Yes, IT must build up a concentration of force in IT security capabilities, but the security burden has to be shared by the organizations data professionals, by its traditional developers (remembering the need for user experiences that are designed for
the scope, scale, and complexity of the information security challenges of today and tomorrow. The real advantage lies in successfully integrating solutions and approachescalling for a holistic security architectureand ensuring that the architecture remains exible enough to deal with the continual ux in security requirements. Integration must extend in another direction toobetween IT and the business. Information security has
migrated to the CEOs priority list; aside from the obvious business risks of having substandard security systems, the fact is that many more business users are increasingly able to compromise security, knowingly or not. Yet they are also ideally placed to improve it by collaborating with IT to protect the business. There are many reasons to expand and enrich the security dialog between IT and the business side. Just one aspect: its not
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security), and by more and more categories of business users. There should be no doubt about what actions need to be taken to bring data security up to par. Many organizations are already pushing hard in many appropriate ways; they are working overtime to catch up with best practices while proactively exploring the newest information security techniques. Indeed, its not unrealistic to expect that some IT groups will deploy honey pots or sandboxing or other emerging methods sooner rather than later, especially to protect their most valuable data or services. The bigger question is whether current efforts are enough. That is the core question that CEOs and their top teams should not be leaving to their IT leaders alone.
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Your 100-day plan

In 100 days, solidify security on the C-level agenda and define the plan to close the gaps in your security strategy.
Work with heads of business to align security strategy with business strategy and update your enterprise threat assessment. Reassess the organizations reliability needs for critical business IT systems, processes, and assets. Determine how security can support them. Develop or revise your security architecture roadmapinclude ideas regarding your second line of defense.
This time next year

In 365 days, start addressing the weakest security links.
People continue to be the softest target. Update your strategy for how malicious or unintentional misuse can be compartmentalized and contained. Test and conrm responses to security breaches including the effectiveness of community involvement. Implement your second line of defensebegin experimenting and prototyping platforms and technologies for security analytics. Identify where techniques such as sandboxing, misinformation, and MTD could better address your rst line of defense. Identify the skills necessary to stay abreast of emerging security processes and technologies. Engage with your chief counsel and chief risk officer on risk tolerances and the evolving threat landscape.
Evaluate your threat scenarios to identify missing perspectives that would improve your security effectiveness. Identify the industry sharing communities where you want to participate and generate and share valuable insights. Evaluate your ability to respond to new insights or security events. Determine whether, with perfect information, you could act on these insights.
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Beyond The Cloud The value lies in putting the cloud to work
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Trend 7. Beyond the Cloud
Beyond the Cloud

No vision would be complete without commenting on the cloud. However, cloud computing is no longer an emerging trend. The on-demand, elastic technology needs to be considered in all decisions made today; the key question is not should we use cloud? but how can we use cloud? More than that: cloud isnt a single concept. Its individual elementsfrom IaaS to SaaS to PaaS, from public to privateare as distinct and different from one another as the opportunities for enterprises to use them. So the real trend is a shift in focus to the next phase: putting cloud to work and crafting an overarching approach that weaves cloud capabilities into the fabric of the enterprisewith business value uppermost in mind.
There are far more followers than pioneers when it comes to adoption of emerging technologies. Thats one of the ndings in Accentures latest High Performance IT study, and its a truth that is borne out in what we see in many enterprises hesitant i approaches to cloud computing. Its easy to see why so many IT leaders hold back. Its daunting enough to determine the vagaries of private cloud versus public cloud without delving into who manages what data where, whos responsible for security, how cloud deployments affect network infrastructure, and more. Cloud computing doesnt get its name just because its something with wispy edges that you cant touch. Its called cloud because its big, and no matter what progress youve made with it so far, theres so much more cloudscape to traverse.
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Leading organizations already sense that theyre still only at the beginning of what they can do with cloudand what it can do for them. Lest there be any doubt that the cloud has arrived, it has been 14 years since Salesforce.com was founded, and 5 years since it topped 1 million subscribers. Likewise, nance and HR cloud-services company Workday was founded in 2005. In 2006, Amazon Web Services began offering IT IaaS; it has since begun offering PaaS. Software giants such as Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP have made signicant progress in cloud-enabling their applications. Cloud has been so successful, in fact, that while many everything-as-aservice (XaaS) start-ups are already old enough to shave (metaphorically speaking), even newer ones regularly present enterprises with innovative opportunities. Its time to stop
thinking about the cloud as a single concept. Its time to start realizing clouds transformational impact across the business. Enterprises must view cloud as an overarching approach that considers the value of PaaS, IaaS, SaaS, and several other as-a-service technologies, and helps determine how they can best become a part of ITs current toolbox. The technology is here, so the conversations should now turn to how these tools can be used to differentiate a companys business, helping it get to market faster and respond more exibly to opportunities and obstacles. By harnessing cloud skillfully, companies can enter whole new businesses or launch new products in short order. VELUX Group, for instance, was able to launch a new product campaign in just three weeksfrom start to ii nishusing Microsoft Azure.
Lets be clear: the opportunity is to use cloud technologies to enable your business. As an integral part of your IT strategy, cloud can make your business more responsive, more exible, more scalablemore competitive. But the point should not be cloud itselfinstead, it is how you embed cloud in your business that will differentiate you.
The cloud opportunity

Accenture estimates that by 2016, enterprises will devote 14 percent of their overall IT product and services spending to cloud, up from 5 percent in 2011. More importantly, by that same time, 46 percent of their new spending will be on cloud-enabled technologies.iii The implementation stories support the data: leading
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enterprises are approaching new system architectures with a cloudrst mentalitythat is, looking at what can be achieved with the different avors of cloud rather than reexively considering inhouse development or off-the-shelf solutions. The implicit message for companies that have focused on one area of the cloud to date: consider the potential payoffs from other cloud technologies.
Despite all the attention to cloud, the expanse of cloud opportunities remains largely underdeveloped. Accentures latest research shows where the biggest gaps lie: more than one-third of large enterprises have yet to implement any cloud technology, public or private, in their infrastructure. For platform cloud technologies, that percentage jumps to one-half. The encouraging part: applications. SaaS continues to lead
cloud adoption in the enterprise. Of large enterprises, 43 percent are at least piloting public SaaS with nearly half of those (19 percent of total) having committed a large percentage iv of their business to it. Accenture expects areas that have lagged, such as IaaS and PaaS, to accelerate in the next three to ve years. Continuing innovation and investment will drive further improvements in areas important to the enterprise, such as cost and security. As a result, IaaS growth will pick up and PaaS is likely to become the primary application development and replatforming approach for the enterprise. Its hard to ignore the cost savings, exibility, and faster time to market that PaaS offers. Deutsche Telekom opted for Googles PaaS offering, Google App Engine, as the basis for
Tripdiscover.dea new type of travel portal that connects consumers with partners, social recommendations, and other high-quality content. Just 18 weeks after the Tripdiscover project began, Deutsche Telekom had in place a fully deployed, exible, real-time scalable system intended to inspire and excite its users with a new type of online travel-booking experience.v But among the growing ranks of companies investigating a wider array of cloud technologies, a farsighted subset is looking for more sizable benets from their efforts. They understand that every time they master one element of cloud computing, its easier to see the potential of another one. Despite inconsistent rates of adoption across layers of the stack and in some verticals, cloud services have become drivers for many other technology
all the attention to cloud, Despite the expanse of cloud opportunities remains largely underdeveloped.
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changesfor social media, for instance, and for at least part of the rising popularity of todays data analytics activities. Case in point: BMW Latin America used Microsoft Azure to drive a social-marketing campaign for the launch of two new model lines.vi Another snapshot: Shell is relying on Amazons cloud to pilot its use of Hadoop for new analytics vii work.
Getting a handle on the hybrid cloud

Given the growing number of mature cloud-computing options, enterprises have tough decisions to make about cloud in the real world. Can they deploy different forms of cloud at the same time, and, if so, how? Whats the potential for mixing on-premise and offpremise IT, or for integrating cloud with legacy systems and traditional
software, in order to create hybrid capabilities that combine the best of all of clouds elements? Imagine, for instance, the viability of a retailer that can successfully use the cloud to hire extra e-commerce capacity for the ve weeks at year-end, and then bring all the customer and transaction data back to its internal system in January. The ability to rapidly build capabilities to capture more of the available demand gives the retailer potent advantages. The hybrid cloud means different things to different people. Whether it means mixing forms of clouds or integrating cloud with existing IT, the real challenge is a new avor of the perennial one: how will you handle the complexities of service and data integration across systems? When enterprises rst began to rely on the cloud, many cloud
systems were siloed applications. Since then, the surging numbers of cloud deployments, supported by maturing technology, have increased enterprises condence that cloud, in many shapes and forms, can create value. Todays cloud projects, even in a private cloud environment, now are less about simple SaaS conguration and more about the complex integration required to weave new SaaS systems into the existing IT
fabricinto and around ERP systems or legacy mainframe applications. When EMC turned to Salesforce. com for an update to its CRM systems, it was far from a standalone deployment. The company integrated the SaaS solution with Oracle E-Business Suite, its own custom campaign-management tool, and its e-mail infrastructure in order to handle nancial, operational, and communication information.viii
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For the foreseeable future, traditional software systems will continue to play a crucial role in the overall IT landscape. Recognition that the hybrid world of cloud and traditional IT must coexist has important implications for how an enterprise prepares for the future. In many enterprises today, skills are separate and isolateda Microsoft Azure team here and a SAP team there. A hybrid world demands hybrid skills; the most
valuable talent will be the architect who understands the functions and roles of all the pieces and who knows how they all work together. Just as important, the governance of the solutions becomes key. The technology organization now needs to design and operate a mosaic of best-in-class capabilities so that the business can take advantage of the capabilities to create new
hybrid world demands hybrid skills; the A most valuable talent will be the architect who understands the functions and roles of all the pieces and who knows how they all work together.
opportunities. When an enterprise has one or two cloud-dependent applications integrated with the legacy systems in its portfolio, an ad hoc approach can still work. However, even if the number of those applications simply doubles, it suddenly becomes crucial to properly broker those connections and relationships. An architect needs not only the ability to patch together the mosaic of services but also an understanding of the changing implications of the cloud on supplier and vendor management. The enterprise architecture of tomorrowe.g., data, integration, monitoring, securitywill look very different from its forebear of just a few years ago. To be successful, enterprises need to fundamentally revise their notions of enterprise architecture; for many, enterprise architecture has already been
relegated to a limited role as a management function that keeps technology in check, meaning that those organizations have missed valuable opportunities to use cloud to substantially transform their processes. Whenever the business undertakes a new projecta business process change or an investment to enter a new business, for instanceit is important to inject the art of the possible into those early decisions and discussions. Cloud thinking can help bring out the projects true potential by asking new questions: Can we consume this as a service? Can we sell this as a service? How would we monetize it? If we can scale on a moments notice, what possibilities does that bring? The goal of using cloud has to be business value; cost reduction is a byproduct, not the answer.
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Choosing the right cloud

The last question, then, is this: public or private cloud? Whats most important to noteand what keeps cloud deployment rates on the timid sideis that theres no one right answer. Many IT leaders shy away from public cloud SaaS options, even those that are nancially and logistically viable.
However, this is not to say that public cloud is now universally applicable. IT leaders continue to wonder what systems will work best in the cloud. Whats clear is that there is no tipping point beyond which public cloud technologies become the default for all IT systems. In fact, its unlikely that companies will move their core systems to a public cloud service anytime soon. For instance, the majority of respondents to Accentures research felt they would
never move their ERP/nance system (64 percent) or any core industryspecic application (59 percent) to the public cloudand that may be prudent of them.ix In the near term, the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies will host in the cloud, but theyll also maintain tight control of their mission-critical systems through private cloud solutions.
internal processes. The new cloudbased solution, completed in just nine months, simplied operations, accelerated applications, and reduced riskallowing the copper company to focus on its overarching objective: growth.x
cloud technologies have As matured, the decisions about when to use public cloud services have become more nuanced.
As cloud technologies have matured, the decisions about when to use public cloud services have become Heres one example of where the more nuancedand more important. leading implementers are going. Although todays public cloud Following a major acquisition, decisions may be all-or-nothing Freeport-McMoRan, the worlds propositions, over time, applications largest publicly traded copper will be partitioned differently, and company, launched an extensive IT groups will adopt more granular ERP transformation initiative using ways to split applications (even a private cloud architecture. The inside tiers). For instance, it wont be companys existing infrastructure a question of where the complete and ERP environment were inhibiting customer database resides; it will its ability to grow at a critical time, be a matter of deciding what data when Freeport was revising its belongs where (based on source, operating model to harness emerging scale, cost, and accessibility) and how technologies and streamline its the services that operate on it can
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and should be integrated. In short, its about the emergence of a highly exible, services-based data layer. Eventually, business leaders will stop asking questions like, is the cloud secure enough for storing my customers personally identiable information? Their actual behaviors hint at the ambivalence behind such questions: 77 percent of enterprises say they will never place sensitive customer information in the public cloud, yet CRM is one of the hottest SaaS areas.xi The question will give way to compromise: businesses will gure out how to take customer datawithout identicationand partition, protect, and integrate it as appropriate, on the basis of technology capability, security standards, and their users own comfort levels.
Enterprises are just starting their cloud journey. Although the safe option may appear to be private The proof that an organization is cloud, we expect more and more headed in the right direction is that the organizations to start relying on term cloud will start to fade out of the more public options for some conversation. business units or geographies. Wireless - semiconductor maker Qualcomm took this approach in rolling out a public cloud ERP (NetSuite) to certain subsidiaries while maintaining its traditional ERP why enterprises must prepare for a maturity of the tools available and xii system (Oracle) at the corporate level. hybrid world. the value they can generate today.
Over time, then, enterprises will have built up enough success stories about public cloud deployments, and will have captured enough value from them, that they will be condent enough for public cloud to become their go-to option whenever public cloud alternatives exist. Few CIOs will be able to match the economies of scale that public cloud providers can deliverwhich is one more reason
The proof that an organization is headed in the right direction is that the term cloud will start to fade out of the conversation. Instead, its IT leaders, and to an increasing extent use will be described in ways that their business colleagues, now need relate to its business value. Perhaps to move beyond the cloud. The the CIO will touch on her reliance discussions that continue to make on on-demand services to socially headlines are already obsolete topics enable the enterprise, but there when reviewed in the context of the wont be explicit discussion about those servicesmuch less any special
Moving beyond the Cloud
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Your 100-day plan

In 100 days, agree on a cloud strategy that emphasizes cloud as an enabler of business growth.
mention of cloudunless the CIOs audience requests it. Put simply, every organization can use cloud now to support its other technologies and to bolster its business processes. Cloud is entirely good enough to help organizations achieve much of what they need to achieveand it has the potential to deliver much more in the years to come.
Inventory current cloud deployments across the enterprisepublic and private, IaaS and PaaS and SaaS, diversity of cloud vendors, and so onin order to build awareness among leadership.
Look at the external marketplace for representative/peer cloud success stories to broaden understanding of the art of the possible. Identify and prioritize opportunities to implement services in the cloud within your existing IT road map, particularly in near-term application modernization challenge yourself to think cloud rst. Evaluate the cloud knowledge/skills of your enterprise architects and develop updated training plans as necessary to prepare them to lead the rest of the IT organization forward.
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This time next year

In 365 days, execute your cloud strategy; implement it piece by piece as your company buys, builds, and connects to its next generation of IT services.
Create decision criteria for cloud selection and readiness evaluations. Update your cloud strategy to create company standards for procuring and managing cloud services. Extend your operations architecture and services catalog to include private and public cloud services.
Integrate cloud into your other technology road maps use cloud to enable social, mobile, or analytics. All your approaches need to be cloud-ready. Update your enterprise architecture in preparation for partitioning of data and services across hybrid cloud deployments. Create an architectural review process to evaluate new IT projects for cloud usage.
Develop cloud skills aligned to your chosen platforms through recruiting or training and embed these skills in your project teams. Actively govern your use of cloudcontinuously evaluate cloud usage and providers against your plan and standards.
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Conclusion
How will your digital business take shape?
When U.S. president John F. Kennedy gave his famous man on the moon speech to the U.S. Congress in 1961, he did not try to disguise the scale of the challenge. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space, he declared. Kennedys grand challenge set an objective that invoked competition and red imaginations, even though the goal seemed so far out of reach. More importantly, though, it also served as the catalyst to drive innovation to keep the United States from being left behind. While the scale may be different, enterprises nd themselves facing
a grand challenge of their own: relentless and rapid changes in the digital landscape that continue to reshape the business environment around them. The fact that companies need to quickly adapt is well known, but often the direct and obvious impetus to change is absent. Accenture believes that business leaders must now set out strategic challenges that become the drivers for change for their organizations. The ways in which those organizations recognize and realize their challenges will be unique, but the digital challenge they all share will be to reimagine themselves in the context of an
increasingly software-driven world. In every company, IT will have to become a strategic competency woven through the enterprisein particular, the ability to derive insights from an increasingly quantied world and leverage the arsenal of constantly emerging software advancements will power efforts to optimize, grow, and innovate. To be effective, the challenge has to have an imperative. Kennedy called for setting a man on the surface of the moon and returning him safely before the end of that decade. We propose that by the end of your next planning cycle, business chiefs should have issued
their grand challenges if they expect their organizations to outcompete throughout the decade to come. Hark back to when Kennedy pointed to the specter of the Soviets Sputnik satellite to show that the United States did not have the luxury of time in the space race. With as much conviction and vigor, business leaders must cite the volatility and uncertainty of global business to frame their own grand challenges. The technology trends described in this report will become the approaches that help transform those challenges into reality. The groundwork for such declarations lies in recognizing
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Conclusion
the reach of technology in each organization today. Every company is, to some extent, becoming software-centricnot in terms of the product or service it sells or the industry it belongs to, but in terms of the impact that software, in all its manifestations, has on the companys fortunes. Yet there is a widening gap between the companies that embrace that reality and seek ways to benet from it and those that continue to see IT as nothing but support for the business. Software is an essential part of every company and a potential disruptor in every business. Furthermore, there is a growing gulf between the technologies that are increasingly available to
address businesss challenges and opportunities and the capabilities of many organizations to utilize those technologies. The faster that technology develops, the more that gulf widens. The gulf has to start closing. The technologies that until recently were considered cutting edgefrom mobile to social, from analytics to virtualizationare accessible and realizable today. The appropriate response now is to acknowledge that the technologies are good enough and that the immediate issue is to look inward to prepare the organization to work with them. To start with, the challenge will call for some soul searching within the
top executive team as its members consider what it means to have technology become an essential part of how they grow their business. They will need to be role models themselves for the changes required before they can expect their business managers and IT managers to begin working in tandem. Assuming that the companys leaders can and will embrace the new mindset and demonstrate it in their actions as well as their words, one of the rst actions toward becoming a digital business will be to retool IT to equip its professionals to understand the business hurdles and opportunities and to do the same with business professionals
so they grasp the implications and possibilities of technologyfrom designing for analytics and digitally managing customer relationships to shifting to active defense models of Internet security. The necessary follow-on will be to design and implement cross-functional ways of working so that the retooling efforts stick and the silos dont reappear. Another key action will be to infuse the whole organization with a culture that is driven by insight. This will call for new ways to think about and act on data. For instance, both business and IT professionals will need to develop a sixth sense for value in sources of information previously out of reach or viewed as
88
Conclusion
irrelevantsocial media and e-mails, for instance. And as we mention in this report, they will have to learn to look for insights from data in all three of its dimensions: velocity as well as variety and volume. The next part of the digital challenge will be to quantify everything that moves, and plenty that doesnt, cataloging what is known and what the organization needs to know. That last part is really important: increasingly, organizations will have to design their applications to collect and report transactions, activities, and logs. In short, organizations need to have the right data, not just more data, if they are to extract the insights that can accelerate their performance.
Organizations must then prepare for a state of constant evolution. This is where IT can step up to make the whole enterprise as agile as it can be, leveraging on-demand services (a.k.a. the cloud), agile user-experience models, and data platforms and taking a portfolio approach to technology so that many small experiments are constantly in play and those that prove to be winners can scale up fast.
That means rewarding for collaboration, for innovation and change, and for experimentation and tolerance of failure. These measures will involve a wholesale reframing of ITs purpose, from cost center to business driver. And they will extend deep into the development of human capital, identifying and helping to implement new criteria for hiring, retaining, and developing data-savvy business professionals as well as IT staff with very different skill sets and And then there are the issues of skills, aptitudes from capabilities, and incentivesno small their forebears. matters. The challenge has to include specic measures to enable and Such a grand challenge is no mean motivate according to the behavior feat. It represents a massive change and culture required. effort in its own right. So is it even feasible?
Of course it is. We all know the results of Kennedys grand challenge: Neil Armstrong became a household name worldwide. And compelling examples can be found in the business world. General Motors has reaffirmed its position as one of the top-selling auto manufacturers in the world, owing, in no small part, to its reinvention of itself as a leaner, greener, and more innovative company. Big change is entirely possible. Right now, its 1961 in the corporate worldat least as far as technologys proper role is concerned. Thats the moon up there. Go for it.
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Research Methodology
Research Methodology
Every year, the Technology Vision team at Accenture Technology Labs, with contributions from the Accenture Research organization, pinpoints the emerging IT developments that will have the greatest impact on companies, government agencies, and other organizations in the years ahead. the technologies that already drive Impact beyond any one industry changediscrete categories such silo as social networking, mobility, and These crowd-sourced ideas were big dataand concentrated on the Ability to be more than a one then screened against inputs from themes that will soon start to appear for one replacement for an several other sources, including on the C-level agendas of existing solution the recent activities of commercial most enterprises. R&D labs, the academic literature, Practical actionability within the the ow of venture capital funding, The Technology Vision team next 12 months trends highlighted by IT analysts, and then worked with experts from This years research effort began with key themes at industry conferences. throughout the company to Transcendence of any one vendor the collection of nearly 2,000 ideas, For perspective, we tapped consolidate, lter, and prioritize the or discrete product technology trends, and technology hypotheses Accentures High Performance IT accumulated ideas and to test each from the architects, engineers, and research and the ndings from our idea against the following criteria: These tests produced a handful scientists across Accenture who see annual CIO Forum. of robust hypotheses that were the impact of technology changes Certainty of transformational synthesized into the seven every day in their work with clients. The ideas that bubbled to the top impact on enterprises overarching themes presented in this Using a social platform to gather stood out for their relevance to years report. the ideas and host the discussions, real world business challenges. Velocity and scale of technology participants went far beyond simply Specically, the Technology Vision change posting an idea; they took the time team sought ideas that transcend to read, converse, and help improve the ideas as a whole.
90
End Notes
End Notes
Introduction
i v
Burberry: Entrenched in the Digisphere, Telegraph, November 24, 2012. http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/news-features/TMG9694181/Burberry-entrenched-in-thedigisphere.html
Ford Looks to Hadoop, Innovative Analytics, Datanami, July 6, 2012. http://www.datanami.com/datanami/2012-07-06/ford_looks_to_hadoop_innovative_analytics. html
vi
The Navigator: With Social Media, Airlines Have a New Kind of VIP, Washington Post, December 13, 2012. http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-12-13/lifestyle/35813170_1_social-media-virginamerica-customer-service
Relationships at Scale
i
Shopper Alert: Price May Drop for You Alone, New York Times, August 9, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/10/business/supermarkets-try-customizing-prices-forshoppers.html
vii
Case Study: Hijack by Meat Pack, Creative Sandbox, December 11, 2011. http://www.creativesandbox.com/case-study/meat-pack-hijack
Sidebar: Gauging the Value of Trust

ii
Sports Fans Online: Examining the Digital Element of the Total Fan Experience, eMarketer, July 2, 2012.
i
Borders to Sell Customer Data to Barnes & Noble Under Privacy Opt-Out Deal, Bloomberg, September 26, 2011. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-22/borders-intellectual-property-sale-delayed-byprivacy-issue-judge-says.html Privacy Policy May Sink B&Ns Purchase of Borders Name, PaidContent, September 22, 2011.
iii
Global Trust in Advertising and Brand Messages, Nielsen, April 10, 2012. http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports-downloads/2012/global-trust-in-advertisingand-brand-messages.html
iv
Accenture Video-Over-Internet Consumer Survey 2012: Winning the Battle for Consumer Trust, Accenture, April 12, 2012. http://www.accenture.com/us-en/Pages/insight-video-over-internet-consumer-survey-2012. aspx
http://paidcontent.org/2011/09/22/419-privacy-policy-may-sink-bns-purchase-of-bordersname
91
End Notes
Borderss Sale of Personal Information Approved by Bankruptcy Court, The Secure Times, September 29, 2011. http://www.thesecuretimes.com/2011/09/borderss_sale_of_personal_info.php
ii
iv
M2M Cellular Connections to Hit 2.5 Billion by 2020, Strategy Analytics, August 3, 2012. http://www.strategyanalytics.com/default.aspx?mod=pressreleaseviewer&a0=5263
UPS Makes No Left Turns in Quest to Deliver Sustainability, Bloomberg, September 20, 2012. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-20/ups-makes-no-left-turns-in-quest-to-deliversustainability-q-a.html
The Economic Value of Trust, Outlook, Accenture, October 2003. http://www.accenture.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/PDF/technology.pdf
iii
Facebook Director of Product Design Margaret Stewart on Users Deserving an ROI, Fast Company, November 26, 2012. http://www.fastcompany.com/3003153/facebook-director-product-design-margaret-stewartusers-deserving-roi
vi
Redline Communications Announces the Major Expansion of Its Network at a Shell Oil Joint Venture Oil Field, Redline Communications, April 9, 2012. http://www.rdlcom.com/en/about/news/archive/redline-news-2012/519-expand-shell-jointventure Digital Oilelds Special: Got Oman Covered, Arabian Oil and Gas, September 12, 2012. http://www.arabianoilandgas.com/article/viewArticle/10610
Design for Analytics

i
Erik Brynjolfsson, Lorin M. Hitt, and Heekyung Helen Kim, Strength in Numbers: How Does Data-Driven Decisionmaking Affect Firm Performance? April 22, 2011. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1819486
vii
Ford Hybrids EV+ Feature Learns and Automatically Adjusts Powertrain to Deliver More Electric-Only Driving, Ford, November 8, 2012. http://media.ford.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=37344
ii
Netix Analyzes A Lot of Data About Your Viewing Habits, GigaOM, June 14, 2012. http://gigaom.com/2012/06/14/netix-analyzes-a-lot-of-data-about-your-viewing-habits/
viii
eBay Pushes More Personalized Shopping, PC Magazine, October 10, 2012. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2410811,00.asp
iii
Knewton Is Building the World's Smartest Tutor, Forbes, February 22, 2012. http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2012/02/22/knewton-is-building-the-worldssmartest-tutor
ix
Rethinking Analytics for the Social Enterprise, Tapscott Group, September 2012. http://dontapscott.com/wp-content/uploads/Rethinking-Analytics-for-the-Social-Enterprise-1. pdf
92
End Notes
Sidebar: Why the Business Now Needs to Care About APIs

i
iv
Ibid. TimeThe Next Source of Competitive Advantage, Harvard Business Review, July-August 1988.
OnStar Gives Volt Owners What They Want: Their Data, in the Cloud, Ars Technica, November 25, 2012. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/onstar-gives-volt-owners-what-theywant-their-data-in-the-cloud/
vi
Predicts 2013: In-Memory Computing: Growing Gains, but Also Growing Pains, Gartner, November 30, 2012.
ii
Bechtel: Improving Workforce Efficiency and Productivity through APIs, Apigee, 2012. http://apigee.com/about/customers/bechtel-improving-workforce-efficiency-and-productivitythrough-apis
vii
SAP Exec: HANA Customer Count Nears 600, Pricing Tweaks Coming, Computerworld, September 5, 2012. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9230936/SAP_exec_HANA_customer_count_ nears_600_pricing_tweaks_coming
Data Velocity
viii i
Early SAP HANA Adopters Describe Analytics Possibilities and Performance, Data Informed, May 15, 2012. http://data-informed.com/early-sap-hana-adopters-describe-analytics-possibilities-andperformance/
Walmarts New Search Engine Increased Conversion Rates Says Its Global E-Commerce CTO, NextBigWhat, September 11, 2012. http://www.nextbigwhat.com/walmart-search-engine-india-bangalore-297/
ii
3D Data Management: Controlling Data Volume, Velocity, and Variety, Meta Group (Gartner), February 6, 2001. http://blogs.gartner.com/doug-laney/les/2012/01/ad949-3D-Data-Management-ControllingData-Volume-Velocity-and-Variety.pdf
ix
GE Works: 2011 Annual Report, General Electric, February 24, 2012. http://www.ge.com/ar2011
Seamless Collaboration
i
iii
Why P&G CIO Is Quadrupling Analytics Expertise, InformationWeek, February 16, 2012. http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/why-pg-cio-is-quadrupling-analyticsexpe/232601003
Mobile and Social CRM, Nucleus Research, March 2012.
93
End Notes
ii
Finding Value in the Information Explosion, MIT Sloan Management Review, June 19, 2012. http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/2012-summer/53409/nding-value-in-theinformation-explosion/
iv
eBay Fires Up OpenStack Cloud with Nicira Network Virt, The Register, August 8, 2012. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/08/nicira_virty_network_ebay_openstack/
"See the Future of Cloud Networking at Interop," Rackspace, October 3, 2012. http://www.rackspace.com/blog/see-the-future-of-cloud-networking-at-interop/
iii
How Clearspire Used IT to Reinvent the Law Firm, WSJ Blog CIO Journal, April 9, 2012. http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2012/04/09/how-clearspire-used-it-to-reinvent-the-law-rm
vi
Software-Dened Networking: Loads of Potential, but It Will Not Cause Ciscos Demise, Technology Business Research, Inc., November 26, 2012.
iv
The Social Sales Revolution, Salesforce.com, August 16, 2011. http://www.slideshare.net/salesforce/the-social-sales-revolution
Sidebar: Network Optimization

i
Collaboration Helps GE Aviation Bring Its Best Inventions to Life, Salesforce.com, 2012. http://www.salesforce.com/customers/stories/ge.jsp
IP Infusion to Showcase OpenFlow/SDN for Mobile Video Applications on Broadcom StrataXGS Switch Solution at Open Networking Summit 2012, IP Infusion April 11, 2012. http://www.ipinfusion.com/about/press/ip-infusion-showcase-openowsdn-mobile-videoapplications-broadcom-strataxgs-switch-sol
Software-Dened Networking
i
Government Virtualization Could Save More Than $30 Billion by 2015, MeriTalk, January 30, 2012. http://www.meritalk.com/pdfs/virtualization-vacuum/MeriTalk_Virtualization_Vacuum_ Release_013012.pdf
ii
Going With the Flow: Googles Secret Switch to the Next Wave of Networking, Wired, April 17, 2012. http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/04/going-with-the-ow-google/all/
iii
Verizons Elby Outlines Software Dened Networking Plans, TMCnet, May 18, 2012. http://www.tmcnet.com/topics/articles/2012/05/18/291031-verizons-elby-outlines-softwaredened-networking-plans.htm
ii
eBay Goes Live with Virtual-Networking Maverick Nicira, Wired, August 7, 2012. http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/08/ebay-and-nicira/
iii
SDN Shakes Up the Status Quo in Datacenter Networking, IDC Says, IDC, December 19, 2012. http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23888012
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End Notes
Active Defense
i
http://www.homelandsecurityresearch.com/2009/04/schiphol-airport-security-new-screeningtechnologies-designed-to-improve-passenger-and-luggage-screening/
Traditional Approaches to Information Security Are No Longer Sufficient, Accenture, November 23, 2011. http://www.accenture.com/us-en/Pages/insight-security-traditional-approaches-information. aspx
vi
Bryan D. Payne, W. Keith Edwards, A Brief Introduction to Usable Security, IEEE Internet Computing, May/June 2008. http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~keith/pubs/ieee-intro-usable-security.pdf
vii
Decoy Documents May Soon Defend Against Data Loss, eSecurity Planet, April 23, 2012. http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/decoy-documents-may-soon-defendagainst-data-loss.html
Critical Control System Vulnerabilities Demonstrated - And What to Do About Them, SANS Analyst Program, November 2011. http://www.sans.org/reading_room/analysts_program/nitro-critical-infrastructure.pdf
ii viii
DataSoft website. http://www.datasoft.com/products/nova/index.htm
DARPA Active Authentication Program. http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/I2O/Programs/Active_Authentication.aspx

ix
Lance Spitzner, The Honeynet Project: Trapping the Hackers, IEEE Security and Privacy, March 2003. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=859075
iii
PGP Corp. Co-founders Startup Targets Cloud Authentication, Network World, November 26, 2012. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/112612-dunkelberger-noknok-264526.html
x
Invincea website. http://www.invincea.com/make-prevention-possible/detection/
iv
CrowdStrike website. http://www.crowdstrike.com/services.html
xi
Size Matters: Bromium 'Microvisor to Guard PCs for Big Biz, The Register, September 19, 2012. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/19/bromium_vsentry_security_launch/
Schiphol Airport SecurityNew Screening Technologies Designed to Improve Passenger and Luggage Screening, Homeland Security Research, April 2009.
95
End Notes
xii
Next Gen Cyber Defense, JumpSoft, February 11, 2012. http://www.jumpsoft.net/2012/02/11/next-gen-cyber-defense/
vii
Shell Oil Targets Hybrid Cloud as Fix for Energy-Saving, Agile IT, Computerworld, April 4, 2012. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9225827/Shell_Oil_targets_hybrid_cloud_as_x_ for_energy_saving_agile_IT?taxonomyId=158&
Beyond the Cloud

viii i
EMC Improves Customer Visibility with the Sales Cloud, Salesforce.com. http://www.salesforce.com/showcase/stories/emc.jsp
Accenture High Performance IT Survey Round 4, Preliminary Findings (N=187), 2013. (Survey demographics: 187 CIOs at global large enterprises.)
ix
ii
VELUX: Cloud Microsite Delivered in Three Weeks Supports Product Campaign, Accenture, 2012. http://www.accenture.com/us-en/Pages/success-velux-microsoft-windows-azure-platform. aspx
x
Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold: Global ERP Implementation, Accenture, 2011. http://www.accenture.com/us-en/Pages/success-freeport-mcmoran-erp-implementationsummary.aspx
iii
Accenture analysis; IDC base IT spending data from IDC Worldwide Black Book Query Tool, Version 1, 2012, May 2012.
xi
iv
xii
NetSuite Steps Up Large Enterprise Push: Lands Qualcomm, Groupon, Partners with Accenture, ZDNet, May 9, 2011. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/netsuite-steps-up-large-enterprise-push-lands-qualcommgroupon-partners-with-accenture/48496
Deutsche Telekom: Creating a Customer Portal Using PaaS, Accenture, 2013. http://www.accenture.com/us-en/Pages/success-deutsche-telekom-customer-portal-paas.aspx
vi
BMW Supports Model Launch, Develops Prospects with Cloud-Based Social Marketing, Microsoft, July 10, 2012. http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Windows-Azure/BMW-Latin-America/BMW-SupportsModel-Launch-Develops-Prospects-with-Cloud-Based-Social-Marketing/710000001091
96
Contacts
Contacts
Paul Daugherty Chief Technology Officer [email protected] Michael J. Biltz Director, Accenture Technology Vision [email protected] Scott W. Kurth Director, Accenture Technology Vision [email protected]
For more information www.accenture.com/technologyvision

97
About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with approximately 259,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the worlds most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become highperformance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$27.9 billion for the scal year ended Aug. 31, 2012. Its home page is www.accenture.com.
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Every Business Is a Digital Business