The key 2014 trends in web and mobile performance: a new faster Internet – with optimized protocols:

1. A new faster Internet

Internet giants like Google, AWS and Apple are investing in making the Internet faster. A faster web serves more content, adds and searches, which by end of the day, means revenues for companies like Google, Apple and many e-retailers etc.

Applications and the protocols need to be made more efficient to avoid a painfully (for users) slow web. So, in order just to keep up with the traffic, websites need to improve speed by 25 to 50 percent. HTML5 by itself is good, but the big upside comes with the use of the different binary protocols and content optimization tools.

By the end of 2014, the use of optimized protocols like WebSockets, SPDY, Protobuf, and content optimization will become mainstream.

2. Cloud downtime - online showstopper for business

With even giants like Amazon and Google experiencing web outages, we are likely to see more setbacks during 2014. The increasing traffic volume and much more complex applications will become a challenge even for the big websites. We will see some real and quite humiliating showstoppers in 2014 for online business.

E-commerce companies need to start preparing for 2014 with real outside testing failover between data center and vendors, recovery time, trigger validation, data consistency and fall-back procedure.

3. Overload traffic - CDN gets a new angle

Content delivery network (CDN) gets a new angle. Social media has brought a new level of risk to IT departments as a new type of traffic spike emerges. Now, in addition to traditional hacking, websites need to be aware of social media driven "attacks" that can change traffic levels of 100 Gb/s or more from real users. Regardless of whether the attack is a malicious hack or a Facebook post or an organized tweet – very few enterprise infrastructures can handle this load. Normal DDoS protection will not work. Only large CDN providers will be able to absorb the load without caving in.

4. Mobile hacking

With new and much improved services for mobile such as banking, gaming etc., hackers have found new targets. The combination of traditional web hacking and knowledge about apps and mobile operating systems will create a new battleground. There are no new crimes, only new venues. And with the explosive growth of mobile services, it would be naïve to think that this field will remain unobserved by the criminal hacker networks.