Report Pt.1: Singapore IDA’s Infocomm Tech Roadmap 2012

The Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore has identified 9 key technological trends which are expected to impact the adoption of information and communications technology over the next 3 to 5 years. These trends were revealed during a symposium on the island republic.

The last ITR or Infocomm Technology Roadmap was established in year 2005. It is a co-creation process involving many people including professionals from the government sector, leaders in the private industry and the broader community.

The IDA held the ITR 2012 Symposium on 17 Aug 2012 to facilitate discussion of the technologies and the innovation opportunities outlined in the roadmap. It hoped to tap on the invaluable industry insights, experiences and feedback from the community to improve the roadmap and develop a shared technology vision.

“This roadmap helps companies to identify opportunities in all aspects of life,” said Ronnie Tay, CEO of IDA Singapore.

Part of the proceedings during IDA’s ITR Symposium

Part of the proceedings during IDA’s ITR Symposium

The 9 key technological trends are:

1) Big Data

Big Data envisions ubiquitous data consumption where an organisation not only depends on internal data or self-managed data for business decision-making; it can and should also dig into the intelligence of external data such as those from the Internet domain.

It also attempts to address the inevitability of exponential data growth. The issue is whether or not to purge those data or to keep it for future usage and what technology can we use to perform analytics and at what costs which is justifiable to the business?

In 2012, the Big Data technology and services market is estimated to be US$4.8 billion. It is projected to grow at a CAGR of 37.2% between 2011 and 2015, reaching US$16.9 billion by 2015.

A a result of this explosion of data, a new professional category has emerged – the data scientist. Organisations will need them to take advantage of Big Data. Data scientists are individuals responsible for modelling complex business problems, discovering business insights and identifying opportunities through the use of statistical, algorithmic, mining and visualisation techniques.

Increase in investment of Big Data technologies has been overwhelming. Furthermore, the open source community is also actively contributing to the Big Data landscape in many different ways. For example, Cloudera is an active contributor to various Big Data open source projects while EMC’s Greenplum launched its Chorus social framework as an open source tool to enable collaboration on datasets in a ‘Facebook-like’ way.

Another micro trend of Big Data is in-memory analytics where analytics processes run on the core memory of a computer system, providing better performance.

Hadoop is almost synonymous the Big Data. It is a framework that provides open source libraries for distributed computing with MapReduce software and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Hadoop facilitates data processing scalability and takes care of detecting and handling system failures.

2) Cloud computing

Cloud computing envisions large-scale high performance computing resources made available to anyone on subscription basis – with cloud computing, organisation do not need large OPEX in order to deliver large-scale systems.

Forrester Research estimated the global cloud market size for cloud computing to reach US$241 billion by 2020. The public cloud will constitute two-thirds of that market size.

One of the key drivers for cloud computing usage comes in as the side effect of the Big Data trend where social analytics is increasingly common as a business strategy to better understand and respond to customers. The elastic nature of cloud computing lends itself naturally to the business need for intelligence and is increasingly relevant as IT is faced with the demands of ever expanding data, more instant turnaround and more dynamic workloads.

BYOD is reported as the key driver for 30% of organisations having implemented cloud solutions in Singapore. Gartner expects personal clouds to replace personal computers by 2014. The seamless experience and integration of data, social and communication services into a smart device will be the new benchmark for corporate IT offerings.

However, security, data locality and confidentiality, and the lack of service level agreements (SLA) control measures have always been the Achilles heel in cloud adoption.

To address that, the Information Technology Standards Committee has published two technical references on virtualisation security, and security and service level guidelines for public cloud services.

3) Cyber Security

The trend with security has always been around since the beginning of the computer age.

Cyber security is such a critical concern that it is projected to be among the fastest growing segments within ICT for the next three to five years. A proactive and coordinated cyber security system is necessary to minimise the adverse effects caused by cyber attacks from people or organisations with malicious intent. Today, these attacks are systematically orchestrated and commercialised to achieve greater impact and damage, with lesser effort but more sophistication.

Under the guidance of the National Infocomm Security Committee, Master Plan 2 (MP2), IDA is bringing the public, private and people sectors together to secure Singapore’s cyberspace. The framework for MP2 formulates strategic thrusts to maintain the high resilience and availability of Singapore’s infocomm infrastructure and services.

On June 2010, the Stuxnet attacks demonstrated that specific cyber activities could be used to create direct damage on the physical world and upon critical infrastructure that provide essential services. Around mid-2012, Flame was discovered, more potent and complex than Stuxnet.

These events led to the realisation of a new type of threat called Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs).

Hacktivists are using cyberspace, in near real time, as a means to promote their political agenda, freedom of speech and human rights, as well as, for re-grouping and re-configuration of their activities.

Cybercrimes create impacts that are closer (in space), wider (in reach) and faster (in time) while recognising no boundaries. In September 2011, a Norton study on cybercrime noted that in 2010, cybercrime damages, based on financial and time losses amounted to US$388 billion globally.

At the end of 2012, an estimated 659.8 million units of smartphones will be shipped. By 2016, there will be around 5 billion mobile device users. Mobile computing risks take the top spot on the list of new emerging risks.

And with the increasing use of sensory devices and the maturing of anti-malware applications, malware writers are seeking new ground for their exploitations.

4) ICT and sustainability

Sustainability is development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It has emerged as a result of concerns about the unintended social, economic and environmental consequences of rapid urbanisation and economic growth, as well as growing resource constraints.

The 2009 Singapore Sustainable Blueprint outlines strategies and initiatives to guide Singapore to achieve a higher level of environmental sustainability with clear goals to measure out performance. It is a big challenge that calls for social, technological and behavioural changes.

ICT can play quantifying, enabling and integrative roles in addressing these sustainability challenges. An ubiquitous sensing capability for quantitative and predictive analytics, and using smart ICT applications to improve energy efficiency and reduce the carbon footprint are some ways ICT can make a difference. In addition, the ICT sector itself will also need to be sustainable by optimising the energy and resource efficiency of its systems, products and services while minimising environmental impact.

Green initiatives help to mitigate some challenging trends of human sustainability such as the increasing costs and scarcity of energy, population growth and urbanisation, global warming and proliferation of technology usage.

5) Comms of the Future

The popularity of smartphones, tablets and other Web-enabled, connected devices further fuels social media and networking activities. This ‘always on’ connectivity has given rise to a world where the Internet of Things (IoT) influences business and public services as well as our digital lifestyle. More new machine-to-machine interactions are expected to happen. To cope with the scale and elastic demand, cloud-based infrastructure that offer more flexibility will become an attractive proposition.

Globally, mobile broadband subscriptions have grown 45% annually over the past four years. Today there are twice as many mobile broadband as fixed broadband subscriptions. Singapore has a mobile penetration rate of 150.4% while mobile broadband penetration currently stands at 69.7%. The explosion of mobile applications is driving high data traffic and infrastructures will need to evolve to manage the demand. Context-aware services are emerging as the next big wave of applications enabled by mobility.

Networks experience data deluge resulting from higher consumption of over-the-top (OTT) services, HD media contents and social networking and mobile applications. Increasingly, the use of personal clouds and BYOD will define the consumer space, giving rise to a diversity of mobile services and business applications.

Part 2 will cover the remaining 4 big trends: social media, new digital economy, user interface and the Internet of Things.