Unlike any other industry, technology advances and changes at such a rapid pace that current IT solutions are rendered out-of-date in a very short period of time.

Organizations that want to stay competitive and efficient need to understand future technologies that could impact their current solutions.

For IT service management (ITSM) professionals, be sure to pay attention to the following five technologies that will impact ITSM solutions in the near future:

1. IoT

As more and more non-traditional IT devices connect to the network, we will see an impact to ITSM solutions in two key areas: CMDB and ITAM.

To properly support IoT, ITSM tools and processes need to build integration into IoT APIs.

Access to network systems or applications is typically provided using Identity and Access Management (IAM). Traditional IAM solutions would be overwhelmed with the relationship and access requirements required by IoT. Therefore, the Identity of Things (IDoT)—an extension of IAM—applies a unique identifier (UID) to IoT devices, allowing you to control relationships and access between IoT and other entities inside and outside of your organization.

According to Gartner, “IT asset management (ITAM) and software asset management (SAM) systems have traditionally managed IT and software assets of all types. The IDoT will assume some functional characteristics of ITAM and SAM within or integrated with IAM architecture, or be linked to ITAM as attribute stores.”

If IT organizations are not able to properly track IoT devices along with their configuration, they will be unable to secure those devices. ITAM will be critical for tracking everything that is expected to connect to network systems.

2. Compliance and security

It goes without saying that security has become the number one priority in most organizations. However, not many organizations have integrated their security and IT service management processes.

ITIL security management defines best practices for planning, controlling, analyzing, and maintaining security policies in order to protect sensitive data.

IT organizations should plan and design processes that integrate security management into their change management process. IT managers should expect to have more integration capabilities for their ITSM tools and their security tools over the next several years.

3. Security broker authentication

We continue to see IT solutions move to the cloud, which means that many organizations will implement a cloud access security broker for authentication.

Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs) can be on-premises or cloud-based. CASBs apply and enforce security policies prior to allowing access to cloud resources.

Gartner says, “By 2018, 50 percent of enterprises with more than 1,000 users will use cloud access security broker products to monitor and manage their use of SaaS and other forms of public cloud.”

We can expect that it will be the responsibility of IT service management to support those who have difficulty accessing the organization’s cloud solutions.

4. Predictive analysis

It is important to understand current network service impact and costs in order to make informed decisions regarding ITSM. This is accomplished when data and historical metrics are analyzed from multiple data points in order to predict future behaviors or to understand unknown events.

Predictive Analysis helps IT service organizations distribute workloads based on data that has been extracted and analyzed from multiple data sources.

Most ITSM software solution providers are adding predictive analytics capabilities to their service management solution; however, these capabilities are not useful if the IT organization does not have the expertise to understand the data provided. It will be important for IT organizations to employ a data scientist to take full advantage of all the data and performance metrics that IT service management tools will soon deliver.

5. Virtual reality

It might be a few years before virtual reality (VR) solutions work their way into the business environment; however, don’t count VR out too quickly. Knowledge management continues to be a challenge for many organizations. It would not be surprising to see VR technology used for training purposes in the very near future.

Research and Markets believes that the industry will see over 60 percent growth every year for the next five years, transforming it from a fringe technology enjoyed by the techy few into a major medium for gaming, entertainment, and business.

VR could soon be a component of knowledge management if the technology is retrofitted and accessible via an ITSM self-service portal.