Back 
January is the month of diets, exercise plans, and if you’re in the high-technology world, predictions for the coming year. The web is rife with executive prognostications for 2016. What the web is not rife with, however, is those same executives looking back and asking “Did my predictions from last year come true?”
City of Palo Alto CIO Jonathan Reichental noted in a recent LinkedIn post that “Everyone who made 2015 predictions should now be required to say whether they got them right or wrong.” In the spirit of that post, here is a look-back at my predictions for last year (and whether or not they were correct).
My first prediction was that we’d see a decline in everyday enterprises building their own data centers:
“2015 will see a marked decline in companies not named Amazon, Google or Facebook building their own data centers. I’ve had conversations with a number of Fortune 500 customers of late, and they’re all effectively saying that they just can’t justify such a massive portion of their budget for such an undertaking, especially as cloud offerings have matured and there are innovative new-age security solutions to enable these cloud solutions to meet stricter security and compliance requirements.”
Analyst research confirms this prediction. According to a study by 451 Research, organizations are limiting investment in non-strategic data centers and looking to alternatives like the cloud if they require additional capacity.
In the second, I said we’d see more enterprises embrace shadow IT:
“In 2015, we’ll see Shadow IT go mainstream. Those organizations that don’t have (or don’t believe) they have Shadow IT are either dying, extremely regulated, or have their head in the sand. By mainstream I mean that organizations will move from a position of calling Shadow IT negative and they’ll start to look to these initiatives for competitive advantage, harnessing the agility and innovation they can yield, and as a way to streamline processes. Given recent innovations in the cloud security and analytics market, this will be easier for organizations to do in an efficient way.”
I think I was only half-right. Over the course of the year, most of the IT leaders that I met with acknowledged that shadow IT was alive and well in their organizations. Netskope is also seeing an influx of inbound requests to help enterprise CIOs and CISOs address shadow IT in their organizations. That said, we still see about a 10x difference between the expected and actual numbers of cloud apps per enterprise. The actual number has grown to 755 cloud apps per enterprise in October 2015 vs. 579 in October 2014, according to our most recent Netskope Cloud Report.
I also think I may have been overly optimistic in my statement that most organizations would look to shadow IT for competitive advantage. Some IT leaders like Mark Zimmerman at MaRS say shadow IT is “great for employees,” but the general mood is that shadow IT remains a pain in the neck. I do believe that shadow IT presents an opportunity for IT to find incredible tools that will give their business