For those not into Nuclear Physics; Half Life is defined as the amount of time for the atoms in a radioactive substance to decay to half the level they started with.
The IT Industry may enjoy a minor boom once the effects of the global recession diminish but ultimately I suspect we are heading for a long slow decay. The squeeze has started already and will progress driven by organisational demand to consume infrastructure and ultimately software as services.
The challenges ahead will lie in the need to integrate one software service with another across organisation boundaries. This will I am sure intensify the role of pragmatic security architecture driven closely by business needs and management of risk. Other interesting areas I feel will include Business Service Monitoring across the supply chain.