Know the Future Now: IT Trends 2018 - Part 1: IoT, Cloud, RESTful API

 Originally published on December 13, 2017 by Christian Zeh
Last updated on March 29, 2022 • 5 minute read

Of course, we at Paessler have our very own view of the IT business and what its trends are. As a vendor of an IT infrastructure monitoring solution, we focus on topics regarding the professional lives of IT systems administrators. But the world is changing, and many “things” which have not been part of IT in the past are becoming intelligent and are connecting to the internet – and the network.

They have become part of the IT. But of course, it’s not only about IoT, IIoT, or smart cities. IT is in an evolving process. Topics like Cloud, Software Defined Whatever or CX (Customer eXperience) have already been discussed over the past few years and will definitely be touched upon again – only, with an updated focus and perspective. So, here comes our list of the top IT topics for 2018:

Internet of Things

 

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Maybe you can’t bear to hear this anymore, or you don’t like this “all in one box” acronym because it brings together so many completely different topics, like consumer IoT, like wearables or smart homes with IIoT, the industrial version of making things (in this case, production environments) intelligent and connecting them to the IT, or with Smart Cities – gathering data from all aspects of modern life, enabling cities to organize and plan processes and resources in a much more efficient way than they can do now. New technologies like LPWAN or LoRaWAN enable a completely new approach for gathering data, connecting things, and enabling communication.

Cloud

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Again the Cloud will be one of the most important topics, as it has been for all the last years. More and more applications and services are moved to the cloud – whether it’s private or public. The cloud will grow, through technological aspects, as well as by size. IoT will be one of the factors making the cloud grow even faster. On the other hand, the security aspect of cloud services and applications will remain the focus and will beg solutions.

 

RESTful API

 

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More and more devices and things offer RESTful APIs and talk JSON. SNMP, WMI and other protocols are losing relevance. As a consequence, IT professionals now have more freedom in obtaining data from their environment. This no longer consists only of classic IT devices: Whether it’s about managing smart cities, integrating the industrial internet of things into the IT, or taking responsibility for smart buildings, IT will be the central data hub as it’s the only department that is able to handle all the different requirements – AND all the data. And RESTful APIs are a basic requirement for integrating all these things into the IT (by the way you can also monitor almost everything with the REST Custom Sensor).