Blogs

The week of October 19th I had the opportunity to attend the Gartner Symposium conference in Orlando to learn from Gartner analysts and senior executives from the IT industry leaders about what customers (and vendors like ourselves) need to prioritize for the coming year.

Two of the main themes, which match closely with Aruba's position, reiterated throughout many of the speakers were:

• Invest in your Digital Platform
• IoT Security must be addressed to reduce business risk 

Digital Platform

Gartner’s VP of Research, Peter Sondergaard, kicked off the conference with a keynote that implored IT executives to build a Digital Platform to take their business to the next level. This message centered around making the shift to treating IT investments as assets, to build a digital platform to power your business and to reorganize your business processes to optimize for digital.  Gartner believes that vendors must develop open APIs and support an ecosystem that enables best-in-breed technologies from different vendors to work together.

“APIs implement business policies in the digital world” - Gartner Symposium 2016 keynote presenter

This is an area that Aruba sees as critical for the business success in the digital workplace and drove us to develop the Aruba Mobile First Platform with its developer-ready APIs and a strong network of IT and business application partnerships.

IoT Security

IoT is the hot topic with a consensus that as companies invest in digitizing their business and improving business processes, they may not be taking security seriously enough. Gartner predicts by 2020 over 25% of attacks will involve IoT devices yet companies’ IoT security spending today is just 2% of the IT security budget. This was reiterated as a serious issue after the conference when there was an internet DDoS attack that involved IoT devices. If you don’t have an IoT security strategy in place you should make this a priority and learn how Aruba ClearPass can secure your mobile and IoT devices.

Life is Good

One of the other things I look forward to at Gartner conferences is the chance to hear from keynote speakers from outside the IT industry. This year the CEO and founder of Life is Good, Bert Jacobs, gave a great talk about building your business, giving back to the community, and the importance of enjoying your work since the misnomer of “work-life balance” is just wrong…work is a part of your life. It was a perspective aligned with my view as well as I really enjoy my career and the opportunity to work with such a great team, my second family, at Aruba.