The year 2021 has been a watershed moment for the tech industry. From scrambling to grapple with the Covid-led disruption to leveraging technology to remain competitive in today’s VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) world, CIOs have emerged as influencers and transformers in the new paradigm.
As we draw the curtains for 2021, the new year is expected to be a year of innovations and possibilities that drives positive and profitable business outcomes. Let’s take a peek into some of the technology trends enterprises are looking to invest in and adopt in 2022 to ensure business continuity and agility.
Cyber Security Mesh
The global disruption was a wake up call for organizations that thought security is reactive strategy. The shift to remote working, on-going adoption of cloud and digital technologies have made enterprises truly borderless. And a strategy that focused only on protecting what we defined as ‘assets’ within the enterprise network, proved highly insufficient.
Whether it’s ransomware, supply chain attacks or deepfakes, enterprises need to be prepared for an evolving threat landscape. In a highly distributed environment, where users, data and applications are spread across locations and platforms, security can’t be a static one-size-fits-all.
Here’s where the Cyber Security Mesh comes into the picture.
Cyber Security Mesh Architecture (CSMA) –which is part of the zero trust philosophy- is an integrated approach to securing all enterprise IT assets regardless of location. Cyber security mesh adopts a new approach to digital security by enabling businesses to develop security measures specific to the identity of a device instead of the proximity to protected connections.
Hybrid Enterprise
The future will likely remain hybrid—with enterprises adopting everything hybrid IT across the board, including hybrid cloud, hybrid work models and hybrid CX strategies.
As the way customers interact with brands change dynamically, organizations are adopting platforms and infrastructures that are more scalable, flexible and are not bound by a single vendor.
With firms committing to hybrid IT, tech leaders are reassessing their goals while balancing the privacy, speed, and security of their data and business outcomes.
As companies transition to the hybrid workforce of the future, adoption of related solutions will be on the rise that makes way for uninterrupted communication and seamless collaboration. While companies have consolidated their tools and platforms, the hybrid approach to worker enablement will remain the best option for the foreseeable future.
AI-enabled business applications
As businesses have been fraught with various challenges in these uncertain times, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a key tool in the global response to the pandemic, and we are likely to see its increased adoption in the years ahead.
The shift towards remote working and e-commerce will continue to drive AI adoption as businesses explore automation, behavioural analytics, and personalisation. Organizations are seeing a shift from point solutions to a suite of AI-enabled business applications built upon a common platform. With enterprises already reaping the benefits and value delivered by their AI investments, they are setting aside a significant investment for the future use in the areas of product development, marketing, sales, and service operations.
Undoubtedly, AI will become a greater organizational priority throughout 2022, and it will be used to optimise business processes, reduce risks/costs and enhance efficiencies.
Distributed Edge Computing
Enterprises are focusing on cloud capabilities in the wake of remote and hybrid working becoming the new norm. Despite the adoption of cloud computing in a big way, businesses have realized its shortcomings with a significant portion of the data getting processed between connected devices. In such situations, Edge Computing helps solve some of those problems as a way to bypass the latency caused by cloud computing and it can be used to process time-sensitive data in remote locations with limited or no connectivity to a centralized location.
Distributed Edge Computing empowers businesses to stay agile and bring real-time decision-making. With organisations trying to adjust their hybrid work models, most of them are taking the leap in exploiting the benefits of a distributed enterprise model.
The rollout of 5G will only increase its demand as well as the need. Going forward, Edge promises a brand-new market segment that promises to be even larger than the cloud opportunity.
AR in enterprise applications
In the next year, expect to see AR integrated even more into sales and training spaces, where the reality of hybrid work as the new normal has transformed the way we collaborate and learn. The pandemic lockdown and the subsequent impact of remote working and e-commerce have only led to Augmented Reality (AR) finding a way into new use cases. There’s no doubt that opportunities in enterprise applications are huge. With AR making inroads into every sector, we can see huge investments from enterprises for smart manufacturing, which will be a major driver for the growth of the AR market for the enterprise industry.
With increasing investments in AR technology, adoption of AR applications will be seen significantly in sectors such as enterprise, retail, healthcare, and media & entertainment, etc. while consumer application will account for the largest share of the AR market in the years ahead.
