‘Tis the season, and IT professionals everywhere are starting to think about the year in review and look ahead to 2014. As work environments continue to become increasingly social and distributed, the role of IT gets more complex -- and more important -- every year. Now more than ever, it’s critical for businesses of all sizes to protect their increasing amounts of data. In fact, 2.5 billion gigabytes of new data are created every day; 90 percent of the world’s data was created in the last two years alone. Forrester predicts that Big Data will be a major driver of IT spending in 2014, growing faster than any other technology category. In light of that, here’s what IT folks have on their holiday wishlists this year:

Organizations create, manage, and rely upon data more today than ever before. This dependency makes round-the-clock data protection vital to ensure your business doesn’t miss a beat, no matter what — power outage, device theft, or human error.

Businesses have been building incubators and innovation-focused research labs for a long time, but tech companies have taken it to a whole new level in the last few years. Some of them are “skunkworks” labs, operating in secret and attempting wild ideas that may or may not work. (Think Amazon’s delivery drones.) Others are less secretive, but still designed to move quickly and seek creative solutions for problems that impact companies and consumers in big ways. Below are four examples of corporate labs doing interesting work today.

It’s here. the moment we’ve all been waiting for. No not that second of elation as the in-laws finally pull out of your driveway. Nor the serene happiness you feel once your mother and her sisters cease their high-pitched yacking.