11 essential IT trends you need to know

IPv6 – don’t sell anything without it

Forward thinkers such as Geoff Huston have been banging on about the need to move from the current internet protocol stack (IPv4) to the next-generation IPv6 for at least a decade. Who knows what happened to version five of the protocol but we do know that IP addresses in the older range are running thin.

Now is the time to audit your customers to weed out any older IPv4 technologies – and not just networking hardware such as gateways, routers and switches but also operating systems and middleware.

Run out or return obsolete devices and check that you’re only getting kit that talks IPv6 or for which there’s a firmware upgrade planned soon. And consider what information security needs to be installed if, as is often the case in small businesses, the main line of defence was to hide behind network-address translation.

Analytics is king

Ever since budding Gordon Geckos saw the benefit of the spreadsheet in the ’80s, data has been a staple of doing business.

But often the problem was acquiring those data sets and then interpreting them. Sophisticated analysis required expensive software and licencing or creation of data that was timeconsuming and costly.

But the greater availability of free data and sophisticated web-borne analytics services such as Tableau, and while integrated chipsets are turning inexpensive desktops into processing powerhouses, means the foundational tools for advanced analysis are within reach of every information worker if they have the training and the skills to use them.