Emerging Trends in Software Infrastructure

Strategic Planning Assumptions: By 2006, legacy personal firewalls will be cannibalized by MicrosoftMicrosoft's Internet Connection Firewall (0.8 probability). Device-based personal firewalls will be obsolete for remote access by 2009 (0.7 probability). Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de

Action Recommendations for 2004

Enterprises must adopt a multiyear protection time frame. For 2004, Gartner urges enterprises to install personal firewalls on all devices that go outside the enterprise network perimeter and all devices equipped with wireless LAN access. The need is immediate, and the payback is immediate. However, by 2006, the traditional personal firewall market will be facing a downturn because Microsoft's Internet Connection Firewall (ICF) in Windows XP will eat the bottom out of the desktop/laptop entry market for personal firewalls. Surviving personal firewall vendors will transform their products to add value to ICF on Windows platforms and will be forced to become more clever at on-demand solutions based on Java and ActiveX, including on-demand changes to ICF.

By 2009, firewalling products that attempt to persist on portable devices will be suffering growth pains. Independently developed on-demand security systems that attempt to modify device behavior will have been adopted independently and will clutter devices and clash, each creating interference by applying redundant and overlapping rules and filters to the user's system configuration. In 2013, firewalling policies will be tightly wrapped and bound to remotely accessed applications, so they will execute specific protection rules for the application requested. Security policy will still be enterprise-driven, because the choice of firewalling rules to be applied will be made when a user requests an application from an enterprise portal. These policies will be assembled on demand according to enterprise portal policies. They will be propagated from enterprise security or portal servers with each remote access request for a specific application, whether the application executes on a server or at the remote user's device. Each access request to a portal will enforce security policies relevant to the specific application. Remote applications that are allowed to execute offline will be wrapped with virtual-machine environments in which they will encrypt their memory and storage data.

Prediction -- The support foundation for software infrastructure is changing. Real-time infrastructure will reshape IT operations and infrastructure.

An IT infrastructure is a collection of client devices, servers, storage, networks, databases and middleware that supports the delivery of business applications and IT-enabled business processes. A real-time infrastructure (RTI) is an IT infrastructure shared across customers, business units or applications where business policies and service-level agreements drive dynamic and automatic optimization of the IT infrastructure, thus reducing costs while increasing agility and quality of service. RTI represents a 10-year vision and evolution for the distributed computing architecture and management environments, which will reduce capital and labor costs while increasing IT agility, responsiveness and quality of service.