Eye on Business Leaders Forum
2020
With the NI Assembly & Executive back in place, Business Eye asked a selection of business leaders and commentators what should its priorities be and does its return improve the prospects for Northern Ireland business and the economy for 2020 and beyond?
Gavin Woods Business Development Director at Nitec
2020 Technology Forecast: A Growing Industry In a Turbulent Time
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hen we listen to the news it’s obvious that various sectors in Northern Ireland are having issues and there seems to be a push from Westminster to reduce the size of the public sector here. Despite this, IT in general is a burgeoning area and there a few easy-to-understand reasons for this. Aside from the seemingly ever-increasing inward investment which has been bolstering the sector, computing, websites and apps are pervasive now. Five years ago, you could ask a person to reboot their server during the day; now it would be easier to ask the CEO to give up their firstborn child than reboot their server. All this is an indication of how important IT has become to every aspect of life. Security analysts have explained to us that globally there is a shortage of 300,000
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Gavin Woods Director at Nitec Business Development
security specialists. As the servers, apps and websites we use become more critical, they become a bigger target for hackers. Hence the arms race on IT security and the need for many more trained security professionals. This issue is global and won’t be solved any time soon. While I can’t tell you anything with certainty about your specific business I would say on balance you will end 2020 spending more on IT than you did in 2019. One example of many: there is a general move toward better recovery solutions to reduce the downtime. There is a dawning realisation, even among SME’s that outages or data loss can do real reputational damage. So, enterprise solutions are being used more by SME’s. The Enterprises, for their part, are moving from these solutions to more complex systems to try to ensure that downtime never happens, ever.
The security situation is similar, and I think many companies will find that the solutions they have used in the past are not quite up to the security challenges of 2020. An example might be management of data stored on mobile devices. If you are not doing this already, you will be or should be soon. In summary, to the extent that IT drives the economy I am optimistic that 2020 will be a good year. However, a rising tide floats all boats and vice versa so on the general economy, who knows? With the potential of war with Iran, global trade wars, Brexit etc, it would be a brave individual to try to call it.
