2017 was a whirlwind of a year with acquisitions, new technologies, cyber-attacks and more news stories than you can keep up with. This blog post will look back at the past 12 months of tech and the biggest news stories of the year.
WannaCry
One of the biggest tech stories to hit the news in 2017 was the WannaCry attack in May. The attack was the biggest cyber-attack to hit the UK with over 200,000 computers across 150 countries being affected with the NHS being one of the hardest hit with over 19,000 appointments and operations being cancelled due to the patient data being encrypted.
Whilst the NHS claimed that they did not pay the ransom, it has been found that if they patched their old systems, as informed to do multiple times, the whole attack would have been prevented.
After this mass attack, it was clear to see that many organisations started to take their security a little more seriously and with GDPR coming into play early this year, it opened many eyes as to what damage can be done if your business is not secure.
Augmented Reality
After the incredible success of Pokemon Go in 2016, it was clear to see that people were adapting to augmented reality through their smartphones. In 2017, Apple launched their latest iPhone, the iPhone X. Whilst this is not an out of the ordinary announcement, there was new technology introduced on the phone. The device comes installed with an ARKit allowing users to enter an augmented reality world with apps that allow you to play games, shop and look at furniture within your house to check the style and fit within your house.
VMware also joined the AR/VR craze at their annual VMworld event in Barcelona in September. Pat Gelsinger, VMware CTO was joined on stage by Alan Renouf to demonstrate the capabilities of the VMware suite through moving a VM on premises to vSphere on AWS.
Microsoft to provide VMware on Azure
Somewhat bold news in 2017 was that Microsoft will run VMware applications on Azure. Microsoft are working with an unnamed partner to make this possible independent of VMware and whilst there was a little friction to begin that VMware do not support this vision, all seems to be going ahead now with the blessing of VMware.
Microsoft state that they can make a frictionless path to Azure for your VMware environment. The free service was made available on November 27th to all Azure Customers and can help acorss all the following phases:
- Discovery and assessment
- Migration
- Resource and Cost Optimisation
Click here for more information about the integration.
Was Bitcoin the Cryptocurrency of 2017?
2017 seemed to be the year that cryptocurrencies soared and actually joined the global financial system. The leader throughout the year seemed to be Bitcoin with the value of bitcoin has risen steadily over the past 12 months from just $960 in January to over $10,000 towards the end of the year and actually accounted for more than 50% of value of all crypto assets.
The dark horse of cryptocurrency that took everyone by surprise and actually came out as the best performing was Ripple. Unlike the steady growth of Bitcoin throughout the year, Ripple skyrocketed by 800% within the final 3 weeks of the year. After this impressive growth, many predict that Ripple will be the Crypto currency of 2018 and is now the one to watch.
HPE acquired Nimble Storage
In April, HPE completed the acquisition of Nimble Storage for $1.09 billion. The purchase improves HPE’s hybrid IT infrastructure portfolio with a range of hybrid and all-flash arrays as well as Nimble’s highly regarded predictive analytics platform, Infosight.
HPE believe that this acquisition is a win-win for both their company and their customers. “Customers deploying hybrid IT not only need the performance of flash storage but are looking for predictive intelligence to optimize their infrastructure,” said Antonio Neri, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise Group, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “With Nimble Storage and 3PAR, we can now deliver on those storage needs and provide more effective on-premises control and performance, at public cloud economics.”
Click here for more information on the acquisition.
Atlantis sell elements of business to Hive-IO
In June 2017 it seemed that Atlantis Computing seemed to be struggling to survive in the ever-changing technology industry as they were in the middle of negotiations seeking funding from investors.
Hive-IO bought certain assets, such as the Software-defined storage technology of the organisation, expanding their storage offering and increase performance and capacity to help lower the cost of VDI for their customers. The Atlantis elements of the company eliminate the inefficiencies of SAN and NAS hardware with their software-defined storage layer.
For more information about the Hive-IO and Atlantis sales, click here.
2017 was an exciting year for the technology industry and I am looking forward to seeing what is in store for 2018.
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