IT trends to look forward to in 2017

Hi all,

Well, 2017 is well and truly underway and it’s looking to be another big year in IT. There are going to be a few major areas to watch and take note of this year. I’ll give a brief overview of these below, as well as what they could mean for your business.

Social media presence

There were and still are plenty of organisations that believe social media is a fad, for keeping in touch with your not so close friends, and has no place in business. This thinking is out of touch, and detracts from your business reaching its maximum audience. And it’s not just about having a static business page – having a customer service presence and being able to interact individually and publicly with your client base can be a very powerful advertising tool. Facebook, for example, had 1.79 billion active monthly users in late 2016.

Mobile as a platform

More and more people are using phones and tablets as their main web access device. Not only for news and social media (as mentioned previously) but increasingly for online shopping. Between 30-40% of all online purchases are now being made from mobile devices. As a business, if you want to want to maximise web presence and sales your site must be well designed for mobile use.

Artificial Intelligence

By AI I’m not talking about self-driving cars or robots delivering your mail – this might happen sometime but it won’t be this year! What I mean is programs developed for specific tasks that were previously thought to be only capably done by humans. If you’ve not looked at Google Translate recently you should check it out. It is a prime example of a complex task being fully automated, and while not perfect it is VERY good, and improving all the time. Another feature now bundled into Google Analytics (a website statistics tool), is Predictive Analysis and Anomaly Detection – all designed to automatically give you relevant information and improve your website’s ability to drive sales.

If you would like any further information on the technologies mentioned above, or would like to discuss how to make them work for your business, please feel free to get in touch.

Over the last six months, we’ve noticed a large increase in the number of hacks and hack attempts on websites in general. For a couple of years now we’ve offered an optional web firewall service for any website that we host, we’ve now taken the decision to make this a mandatory package for sites hosted on our infrastructure. If you do have a site hosted with us you’ll receive another email explaining this in more detail, and if your site isn’t hosted with us, but you would like to know more about the service, as always, please let me know.