The big technology trends in 2012 will be extensions of trends that began in 2011 or earlier. For example, wiredFINANCE noted the Consumerization of IT back in September. Expect it to pick up speed in 2012. Similarly, back in January you read about The Internet of Things here. That too will drive technology trends in 2012.

The top IT research firms publish their trends projections for 2012. You can find Gartner’s here. Maybe more interesting to a CFO will be IDC’s security trends for 2012 here. IDC also breaks out IT trends by market segment, such as retail here and manufacturing here.

The tech trends below are based on the numerous vendor briefings and conferences wiredFINANCE attends as well as talking with dozens of IT and finance managers. Most shouldn’t surprise you if you have been reading wiredFINANCE, but a few might. more

A few weeks ago wiredFINANCE looked at the ROI from social networking . It showed Lowe’s , the home improvement retailer, as a leader in the use of social business. But more companies already are doing it.

Meanwhile, Tom Austin, VP and Gartner Fellow, offered this advice back in June: If you’re trying to build positive emotional momentum for whatever you’re trying to accomplish with the business, look seriously at social tools as a potentially powerful element in a broader overall strategy.

For IBM and Forrester Research, the business value [of social networking] lies in the ways it enables collaboration to succeed within a business environment. Here’s what some business are doing with social business clouds now. more

In surveys executives repeatedly express their preference for private clouds due to the perceived greater control and better security. Still, a private cloud needs to generate a ROI justify the investment. Private clouds don’t come free.

Assessing the ROI of private cloud is possible but not straightforward. Additionally the recent economic recession has pressured corporate profits, leading organizations to cut technology spending and limit further investment in cloud, which makes an ROI analysis even more important, according to Cloudtweaks.

Leading researcher IDC notes that many of today’s private cloud business cases are being anchored by savings from application rationalization and IT staff productivity improvements in addition to expected optimization of hardware assets. And unlike the public cloud, which promises to shift IT spending from CAPEX to OPEX, private clouds can actually drive increases in CAPEX. more

For many CFOs, the IT group is a cost center to be minimized. Ironically, the cost of IT systems remains flat (actually falling on the basis of cost per unit of capacity delivered). It’s the cost of administration, management, operations, and power that keeps going up.

Steve Mills, Senior Vice President and Group Executive, IBM Software & Systems, made this point at a recent briefing: “Server management and administrative costs keep going up and the cost of servers drop and the cost of power keeps rising. These are the [IT] economics facing business today.”

The economics Mills cites are changing the way IT systems and capabilities are bought and deployed. The challenge to rein in IT costs has, in part, fueled the interest in cloud computing. Forbes Magazine looked at the issue here and found that there isn’t a simple answer. more

Security concerns around IT systems seem to only get worse. Now organizations must contend with cloud computing, social networking, and mobile computing, all of which ratchet up security concerns. Of course, you can boost security but business will suffer. Restrict social networking and risk losing customers. Let managers access data from smartphones and risk compromising data.

“When Security is around, Productivity disappears. And when Productivity shows up on the scene, Security has to take a coffee break,” writes Aaron Weiss for Dell here.

Workers aren’t stupid. They feel the pressure from management to do more, work harder, work faster, no excuses. They know it is a tough economy; layoffs could come at any time. So they take shortcuts, and a handy place to find those shortcuts is security. How can you strike the right balance? more