Digital companies will handpick the gold nuggets in the hype stack of up-and-coming technologies in 2018.n New Year brings in new opportunities, new challenges and new resolutions. CIOs and companies jostle to identify, vet and deploy technologies in 2018 to gain competitive advantage, delight customers and register growth. The choices for the perfect technology or technologies oscillate for modern businesses as technology proliferation and digital transformation don’t seem to slow down anytime. Both play in a perfect sync or an immediate succession at times. This is a pertinent dilemma for CIOs and IT leaders. 2018 will be a year of complete CHAOS (Cloud, Hyper converged, Analytics, OpenAPIs, Security) as technology companies aggressively push their digital technologies. CIOs will become more of their companies’ business strategists with additional responsibilities of registering digital revenues streams, help global expansion, align IT initiatives to business goals, and more – besides protect the company from cyber-attacks and meet risk compliance policies. Cloud, artificial intelligence, IoT, HCI will be the new normal that will constitute a big chunk of company’s IT infra. Some in over hype. Some in the hype. While some are rolling fast and well into the mainstream. I believe technology chaos will be good (and extremely good) for the technology industry largely dominated by five giant trends in 2018. Cloud Clouds of a weather lock together. Multi-cloud, cloud management, cloud aggregator, CASB and more. Tech industry will evolve more in 2018 from single cloud vendor lock-in to multi-cloud deployments, especially in the public cloud. CIOs will need to be an aggregator of best clouds fit for their business – private, public or hybrid. The hardware Infra lines will blur and the clouds integrate seamlessly and actually talk to each other more than in the past. Big Myth – Cloud is much cheaper than traditional on-prem Infra. Hyper-converged Hyper-converged is the dark horse galloping fast. Every Infra will be converged or hyper-converged–little or more–as almost every tech OEM is venturing into this space. HCI going mainstream is no longer a farfetched priority for IT leaders. HCI in an app economy makes logical sense for enterprises’ digital journey. More innovations by OEMs will offer better business outcomes to companies. HCI will be the new normal on the proliferation of cloud, devOps, software defined Infra and more. Big Myth: HCI is best suited for large and very large enterprises. Artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence delivers more real insights in real time. There’s a new world of M2M. It’s now man to machine than machine to machine per se. Automation, bots, machine Learning, robotics will replace routine or rote jobs though humans will be the real custodian to keep the nuts and bolts of infra will-oiled and running. Big data, IoT, mobility, VR/AR will speeden the adoption of artificial intelligence. Modern businesses will become agile and intelligent to deliver data for a great customer experience in real time. Big Myth: Artificial Intelligence will completely eradicate manual IT jobs. Open APIs Everything is an app today. As companies become digital and most of them are ‘app first’ entities, APIs that govern how one application can communicate and interact with another are a must-have for CIOs and business stakeholders. Spin a cloud for peak load, fast release of mobile app, integrate legacy and non-legacy infra all demand an open API (Application Program Interface) platform providing developers with programmatic access to a proprietary software application or web service. Big Myth: APIs aren’t the most preferred attack vector for hackers. Security Data is the new oil requiring super secure plugs to prevent the leak. Vanilla security solutions like AV, IPS are passé. The hackers too are launching sophisticated attacks to beat the sophisticated solutions at the customer end. They continue with legacy attacks like business email compromise. WannaCry is an example. The connected world is dangerous as attacks through IP cameras, POS reminisce hackers’ larger attack vectors. CISOs would explore UEBA, EDR, IDA and newer technologies of security domain in 2018. Myth: Security strategy is a tactical decision by CISOs and CIOs. 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