Annual strategic technology predictions tend to be a combination of conjecture and branding. Despite the new names, some of these 2022 tech trends will seem quite familiar. Regardless of their “newness”, these predictions are a useful insight into what the IT industry – and your competitors – are working on this year.
1. Data fabric
Effective digital transformation relies on making all of your data accessible across the business. Data fabric technologies will help to break down operational silos by increasing and enhancing integration. It will also use intelligent analytics to automate many of common data management activities.
2. Cybersecurity mesh
Now that remote working has been embraced, businesses must adopt a new approach to security to cope with the loss of the traditional network perimeter. Gartner’s solution is to deploy a cybersecurity mesh architecture (CSMA) that offers “an integrated security structure and posture to secure all assets, regardless of location”.
3. Distributed enterprises
Flexible working and geographically distributed teams need to be reconfigured to embrace distributed services. By making major technical and service changes to deliver frictionless work experiences, distributed enterprise adopters will realise revenue growth 25% faster than their competitors.
4. Privacy-enhancing computation
Strengthened privacy legislation and increased customer awareness mean that data protection is a strategic priority. To assist with these goals, Gartner recommend adopting privacy-enhancing computation (PEC) technologies that securely share, pool and analyse data without compromising confidentiality. This is achieved by applying protections at data, software and hardware levels.
5. Cloud-native platforms
As cloud strategies mature, businesses are moving from basic lift-n-shift deployments to cloud-native platforms (CNP). CNPs have been re-engineered to take full advantage of the on-demand, elastic capabilities of cloud platforms making them more cost-effective, performant and future-ready.
6. Composable applications
At the most basic level, this involves moving away from monolithic, legacy applications towards API- and event-driven computing. In reality this will probably manifest as development of more microservices-based applications built and running in the cloud.
7. Decision intelligence
According to Gartner, decision intelligence is “a practical discipline used to improve decision making by explicitly understanding and engineering how decisions are made, and outcomes evaluated, managed and improved by feedback.” Or more simply, how your business uses and applies analytics.
8. Hyperautomation
You probably already automate many of your most common activities. The next evolution – hyperautomation – will see your business automating everything it possibly can for greater efficiency and lower costs.
9. AI Engineering
Artificial intelligence projects are notoriously difficult to put into production or to generate long-term value. AI engineering is an integrated approach to operationalising models to continually enhance value through rapid AI change.
10. Total experience
“Experience” has been an important strategic goal for some time now, particularly in relation to the customer (CX). To continue to drive improvement, businesses are being encouraged to embrace total experience (TX), a strategy that combines all of the experiences – CX, UX, EX and MX – to drive greater customer and employee confidence, satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy. TX will increase revenue and profit by helping your business become more adaptive and resilient while improving experiences across your operations.
11. Autonomic systems
Scalability is crucial to your strategic growth plans – but most existing systems cannot scale. Autonomic systems learn from your environment, dynamically modifying their own algorithms to adapt to new operating conditions. This will increase speed and resilience of business, allowing you to redeploy resources for new strategic projects – or to simply cut costs.
12. Generative AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is great for unlocking previously hidden insights from your data. Generative AI looks at your data and content, using those insights to automatically generate new “artifacts” that will accelerate your operations – like writing code, designing new drugs or tailoring products and services to your customers.
As with any prediction, there is an element of uncertainty in these 2022 tech trends. They all have one thing in common however – they are clearly focused on helping your business do more, more effectively.