According to Petersen there are four key trends that will drive the next 12 months of enterprise IT management in Oman and define experiencesboth at the workplace and as consumers.

Minimising data loss downtime is critical

In 2016 the Internet of Things brings availability to the fore. The rise of mobile and connected devices demonstrates that there is zero tolerance for downtime. Even a slight outage of a few hours will cause everyone involved in the business to be unhappy that they don't have access but more importantly businesses will lose money data respect of employees credibility from partners and loyalty of customers doing potential damage to consumer and investor confidence.

As the Internet of Things continues to gather momentum the potential cost of downtime is set to escalate. Minimising downtime and data loss is critical to the overall health of all businesses and ensuring the end user remains satisfied. In addition since more data and services are now both on premises and in the cloud businesses next year will need to ensure that they have strategies to backup protect and restore their data on all fronts Petersen said.

Legacy thinking must not stifle innovation

The industry has seen significant growth in the capabilities of infrastructure and delivery models but many organisations haven't modernised their application footprint in alignment with changes to technologies around these legacy applications. Over the next year companies will draw the line and migrate to the next generation of application technologies to keep up with competitors.

This migration to the next generation of applications will not be easy for some businesses but will be worth it to deliver on the bottom line. Companies will see new benefits from an IT perspective; but also have a unique opportunity to re-evaluate their business. Migrating away from these systems will enable businesses to offer new services that meet the demand of an Always-On workforce and customer base.

Big Data will appear to shrink

Harnessing and capitalising on Big Data will remain critical for businesses but as the cost of storage continues to fall it will become the norm over next year. Big Data will drop its 'big' label and instead come to be viewed simply as data to be harnessed effectively for customers partners and staff. Businesses will be able to increasingly focus on interfaces and connecting end users to data further elevating the importance of availability of service delivery.

It's expected that 2016 will see increased adoption of virtual reality (Oculus Microsoft Hololens) motion-based interfaces speech recognition and 3D printing as a means to manufacture. For business the IT interface is changing too: In the face of explosive data growth traditional data management techniques no longer apply. The operator interface will focus increasingly on automation and data lifecycle management to ensure the right data is in the hands of the right person at the right time.

Emergence of disaster recovery as a service

Veeam predicts Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) to be a game changer in 2016 as it will enable businesses to meet and exceed customer and employee expectations around availability. 'As businesses place IT and availability at the centre of their operations we can expect to see service level agreements with guaranteed backup and recovery times becoming the standard for the modern enterprise' Petersen said.