How long will your New Year stay Happy?

The Freeform Dynamics fortune-telling kit has been dusted off for 2019. Here some of the events – and risks – we saw in the cards…

Online privacy back in the headlines

A year on from GDPR, the PR machine again goes into overdrive as the EU ePrivacy Regulation, which expands on and supersedes parts of GDPR, comes into force. However, following the way that the original web-cookie rules were dodged by the use of large OK buttons, and the (incorrect) perception that GDPR was a damp squib, many in industry assume the ePrivacy fuss is a case of IT “crying wolf”. Then, with the regulators now having GDPR under their belts, the first fines hit – and they’re calculated at the same level as GDPR, so that’s up to 20m Euro or 4% of world wide annual turnover…

Data governance pays off – for some

Real benefits start to flow for those foresighted organisations that put strategic data governance and value-extraction plans in place, rather than simply aiming to minimise their GDPR costs. This is the upside of GDPR for those that saw it more as an opportunity than a risk, and – crucially – were willing to invest the time and effort that was needed to establish that data governance.

DevOps risks failure as it goes mainstream

More and more organisations scale-out their DevOps strategy this year, so they can leverage its cost, quality and predictability benefits more broadly. Defining a more repeatable, scalable and infrastructure-driven approach becomes a priority, even for slower-moving application areas. It takes a DevOps failure or three, however, before the realisation spreads that while DevOps is full of goodness, it is not a panacea. The winners in all this are the IT architects, because at enterprise level, the ability to design, build and operate a resilient yet flexible systems architecture is far more important than the ability to cut code.

Facebook Workspace goes the way of Google+

Many people love Facebook, but no one has yet cracked the challenge of creating a secure equivalent for businesses, not even the web giant. Is it because the demands of business security are fundamentally incompatible with classic Silicon Valley attitudes to customer data? (As an aside, that oft-quoted line attributed to former Sun Microsystems boss Scott McNealy – “You have no privacy – get over it!” – is now 20 years old.) Or could it simply be that none of the work-focused services really offers enough beyond what Twitter and LinkedIn already provide?

Think we’re right – or wrong? Let us know in the comments below!