10 Hot Technology Trends For 2016

At the beginning of every new year, technology analysts and pundits love to speculate about the new advances the next twelve months might bring. Countless organizations publish their forecasts of what will happen in the technology industry.

At Network Computing, we've combed through a lot of the expert opinions and generated our own list of trends that will be important this year to people involved in IT infrastructure. Some of these trends --like the Internet of Things and cloud computing -- are household words in tech. In fact, these are so ubiquitous they even have their own topic sections on our website. Still, they merit close attention, since both are poised to achieve new levels of mainstream prominence this year.

Other technologies on our list, like blockchain and containerization, are fairly young. Both are worth watching because they look likely to skyrocket in importance in the coming years.

This list also highlights development trends, like microservices architecture and machine learning, and end-user computing trends, like wearables and virtual reality. In these cases, IT needs to make sure that it has the appropriate infrastructure in place to support the rapidly developing technology.

No one knows for sure which technologies will be most important for IT professionals in 2016, but the 10 that follow are well worth watching.

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