For those of you who think that on January 1, 202 at 12:00 AM the world is going to go back to the way it was before COVID reared its ugly head, I have bad news for you; we’re still going to be in this fight. I wish it wasn’t true. I really do! However, contrary to the Peter Pan story, there is no Neverland; only the reality of what we face today.
Right now, in late November, we’ve regressed to nearly the same lifestyle we had when the country closed down in March. The worst part is that we already know what the casualties will be if it continues. I apologize for sounding like ‘Dave, The Downer,’ but not being realistic about what the immediate future holds for us would be incredibly naïve and unintelligent.
How To Handle the Future
How do we handle what the near future will provide us? The first and most obvious goal is to rely upon your friends and family for support. We can’t go at it alone. There’s strength in numbers. One finds strength in functioning organizations as well.
There’s also strength in ‘think tanks.’ Heck, there’s been plenty of time to think about everything to the point of exhaustion. However, if one uses his/her time wisely and merges his/her ideas with their respective teams, more options will be available. These can be used to take on the next initiative or to overcome the next hurdle. Now, that’s the benefit of having time alone to think and then spend more time collaborating with your teammates.
New Scenarios
However, there’s also a danger of having time alone to think. Since I work with an IT Solutions provider, I will focus on those scenarios that may be on your mind. Those brilliant (cough, cough) folks who dreamt up the scheme about sending money overseas to that nice person (they have to provide their bank account information first) so they can store it in an official bank account are cooking up all kinds of different scenarios.
Some of these evil actions will include even more advanced ways of attacking an organizations’ infrastructure. We’ve already had two clients succumb to this and the ‘reconciliation’ costs are astounding. If you know about ransomware, you know what I am talking about. There’s a 50/50 chance of not even getting back company information afterwards too. Last week, an article in Forbes mentioned British Airways, LifeLabs, and Marriot International all experienced data breaches.
Listed below are a few topics that are predicted to be trending in IT budgets in the year to come.
Travel Budgets Used for IT projects
The airlines are very close to their ‘rock bottom,’ and many will likely disappear in COVID’s version of the Bermuda triangle. Forbes also mentioned the company’s budgets for 2021….
“will shift from travel to IT technology spend. This trend will likely continue even after there is a vaccine because everyone is realizing that doing business via the internet and platforms like Zoom is fine. Travel budgets can now be redeployed to “shore up” projects that need a little extra funding — such as cybersecurity and enabling high availability at the edge.”
For many IT implementations, travel is not needed. Zunesis has been hugely successful with doing deployments remotely. The only difficult part of these deployments is the ‘racking and stacking’ of these machines. Well, there are certified IT movers and many customers are even willing to ‘rack and stack’ the machines themselves in order to maintain social distancing.
Ethical AI
Based on consumer privacy issues over the last five to ten years, consumers are finally putting their foot down. Forrester believes the following…
“Over the next few years, firms will deliberately choose to do business with partners that commit to data ethics and adopt data handling practices that reflect their own values and their customers’ values.”
As we all know, there’s been a lot of ‘discussion’ surrounding this topic lately. I am looking forward to witnessing how this trend will evolve. Gartner also mentions this but instead of calling it ‘Ethical AI,’ they call it ‘Privacy-enhancing computation.’
Edge Computing
This is a slam dunk. We’ve even seen this rise in technology well before Covid. If there’s a way to minimize data disruption, Edge Computing is definitely at the frontier of expanding technology. Gartner also feels that ‘Distributed Cloud’ can…
“help organizations provide their services physically closer, latency is reduced, as are the costs of data, helping to ensure compliance with laws that dictate data must remain in a specific geographical region. Gartner notes that distributed cloud is the future of cloud technology generally.”
Total Experience
Via Forbes, Peter High of the CIO Network defines Total Experience as…
“Total experience combines customer experience, user experience, employee experience, and ultimately multi-experience to impact and transform business outcomes. The overlap in these experiences can be improved with technology, and it enables companies to take advantage of disruptive aspects of the current pandemic such as distributed customers, remote work, virtual and mobile.”
It’s about time this was on the forefront. A seamless transaction? What a concept and I am glad to see this as one of the most important IT trends for 2021. Our way of working changed overnight it seemed. Adjusting to the ‘new normal’ with regards to tangible and intangible products has been challenging; especially in education.
Always Changing
These are just some of the changes to expect in the Infrastructure Technology world. There are a lot of dynamic strategies taking place. We will be covering these as we close out 2020 and come out swinging in 2021. We’ll come out on the other side of this as more immune and adaptable than ever before. So, while it may not go back to normal at the stroke of midnight on January 1st, 2021, we’re on our way to the Promised Land!
I am the father of two amazing kids (a girl & boy) and I am now the grandfather of a grandson & a granddaughter. Each time I hear about a school shooting, my heart goes out to the parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, and the entire community of those injured or killed. Each time, my wife and I talk about the number of lives that are forever crushed by such a senseless act.
I also have the honor of leading an IT Organization (Zunesis, Inc.) and an exceptional group of people who make it their business to help make the lives of people better through the application of information technology. For many years, Zunesis has been providing IT solutions to K12 School Districts in the Western United States. Video surveillance is used widely within K12 schools and is a useful technology in understanding what has happened after the fact. For many school shootings, video surveillance has been used as a tool to document what happened when, where and by whom. These benefits of video surveillance are useful, but they are 100% reactive. What if we could use a combination of video and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to attack the problem of school shootings proactively?
How Can Technology Help Prevent Tragedy?
Rapid advancement and innovation in IoT and video analytics may provide a preventative tool to help protect our kids from further senseless shootings. In a nutshell, the idea is to use higher fidelity 4K video cameras and co-resident video analytics software to monitor school activities, entrances, and exits. Advances in IoT allow for computer intelligence to be put at the edge of the network and provide an early warning system, alarm system, or possibly a system that triggers automated functions based on what is seen (like locking a door and preventing a would-be perpetrator from entering the school).
In the past, we have used video to go back and examine what has already happened. Often it is viewed in a central location by someone watching a multitude of screens while likely being asked to do other jobs as well. This new strategy moves the video and intelligence away from a central viewing area and a reactive method, to a proactive, intelligent, at-the-edge approach. Being able to recognize a person or object that doesn’t belong beforehand could provide additional protections for our kids. Ultimately, we want to keep the bad guy(s) out of our schools before they cause harm. In situations where the shooters are students of the school, the video analytics would need to be trained to recognize things that were “out of place” such as large coats (used to conceal weapons) during warm months or students entering the school at unusual times.
Facial Recognition
High-resolution 4K video cameras and video analytics software allow these IoT systems to perform facial recognition or recognize things that are out of place (like a person wearing a trench coat during a warm month of the year). Would it be possible to load up a data repository with graphical pictures of teachers, administrators, students and parents who attend and work at the school? Would it then be possible to implement specific boundaries around allowable entrances and the times those entrances could be used? The key would be to define which people are “safe” and when they are allowed access to the school. The next step would be to define what is normal and what is abnormal for the purpose of triggering alarms and notifications. Over time, machine learning and artificial intelligence could be utilized help monitoring normal behaviors and reacting to behaviors that are inconsistent.
What About Cost?
The next big question is cost? Access to money is always a challenge for our schools. The good news is that 4K video cameras, IoT edge devices, analytics software, and compute and storage solutions (at the edge) are coming down in price. And because video surveillance is being used widely within our school systems already, these new innovations could be used to upgrade the current video systems. It is likely that these new IoT video analytics solutions will be more expensive than the current reactive video surveillance solutions, their cost should not be outside the realm of possibility. Finally, because the K12 market is so large and this need so acute, the technology would surely become more affordable as competition entered the picture and parents, teachers, and politicians became part of the funding discussions.
I recognize that this may sound like a stretch to some, but finding new ways to combat this threat should be considered and IoT and video analytics provide a possible path for that to happen. I for one am encouraged by these new innovative technologies. I believe in the very near future, we will be able to use technology to proactively protect our kids.
