My 2022 (and beyond) Technology Predictions: Driving Change

Europe is not alone in experiencing change not seen for generations. Rarely can you turn on the news without hearing reports of trading issues, security concerns, political relations or the ongoing response to the pandemic.

These may be the headline-grabbing incidents but there is another major force exerting influence on every citizen, business and nation in the EMEA region - technology. With each passing year its effects are vast and are visible from our homes to hospitals. It remains a progress in perpetual motion that is driving us forward and redefining what is considered ‘normal’.

As a result, it is going to be the driving force behind several major trends I, and some of my VMware colleagues, see in 2022 and beyond.

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1. Digital acceleration

The most apparent will be a continuation of digital acceleration spurred on by the pandemic. People have seen the art of the possible and there is no turning back, as evidenced by the investment we are seeing in this space. For example, the Digital Europe Programme has a budget of €7.5 billion, designed to play a key role in the acceleration of the economic recovery and drive digital transformation. It will also help Europe to remain globally competitive and strategically autonomous, and to shape the way new technologies reflect our needs and values. According to IDC research, 63% of CIOs in the Middle East have brought their digital roadmaps forward by at least one year as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic. At a business-level, how this digital acceleration is manifested will be a key driver in our recovery with a much greater segment of the populus now digitally enabled than pre-pandemic. Our Digital Frontiers research shows businesses are now dealing with a consumer base of whom 60% identify as ‘digitally curious’ or as ‘digital explorers’. In fact, 44% of consumers are prepared to switch to a competing brand if their digital experience does not live up to expectations. This is creating an incredible opportunity for organisations to demonstrate the power and impact of their innovation. However, it is also creating a risk for those not keeping pace to lose business, in some cases, permanently.

2. Distributed working?

How businesses - and indeed, nations - establish an equilibrium when it comes to distributed working will be a defining trend of 2022. We are already seeing approaches spanning remote working forever, while some countries, like Iceland, look likely to permanently adopt a four-day working week. Irrespective of the outcome, hybrid working is here to stay which means that security, user experience and convergence will be on every boardroom agenda. We’re going to see a collision of cultures, processes and stakeholders as well as technologies, like the cloud, applications and the networks that bind them, to all help connect employers with employees. That is going to mean everyone will have a role to play when it comes to security - both digital and physical - from HR to the SISO to the security teams manning offices. I’m inclined to agree with Brian Madden, distinguished technologist, end user computing at VMware?who believes that password-less authentication will become a ‘must have’ to avoid attacks. He said:

“In the EUC space, one of the big trends we predict for 2022 is the broad adoption and general acceptance of password-less authentication—something we believe is a “must have” moving forward.?The vast majority of?attacks can be avoided by using stronger methods of authentication.?Password-less authentication is a type of multifactor authentication that replaces the user’s password with a different factor, typically a client-side certificate which is unlocked via biometrics. So, throughout the course of their typical day, users can authenticate to corporate resources from a fingerprint or face scan rather than having to remember a constantly rotating password or use an authenticator app.”?

Though, what cannot happen is ‘security at the cost of usability’. The most critical element here is when it comes to marrying security with user experience and creating a frictionless process.

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3. Modernising applications

For application development, Kubernetes will continue to become more automated and commoditised. The journey to developers and operations teams not needing to worry about Kubernetes yet reaping all the benefits is well underway with efforts such as Tanzu Application Platform.?This trend will continue and accelerate. The legacy and future of infrastructure is born of Kubernetes and is multi-cloud. This is according to Ajay Patel, general manager, modern apps and management, at VMware who provides this excellent insight:?“Kubernetes is reaching critical mass adoption. In 2022, we anticipate seeing more enterprises (including developers that work at these companies) embrace Kubernetes, driven by two key trends.?First, following a year of rapid change, organizations are looking to invest in technologies that give them greater flexibility to easily scale and allocate resources to quickly adapt to changing business needs. Second, multi-cloud has emerged as a strategy that enables organizations to have composable and adaptable business models. A multi-cloud strategy provides the flexibility to move workloads among clouds in ways that optimize efficiency,?cost?and compliance.?According to?VMware’s The State of Kubernetes 2021 Report, 65% of companies report using Kubernetes in production, and 39% report that it has enabled their move to the cloud.”?

4.?Rethinking Security

As cyberthreats continue to grow in number, attacks are becoming increasingly more sophisticated due to threat actors using the advanced learning capabilities of artificial intelligence and machine learning. AI-powered threats continue to raise the bar for IT, security, risk and compliance leaders in their efforts to strengthen cyber defenses – and indeed might even require AI-powered responses. This expanding threat landscape has required organisations to emphasise transformational security platforms that fully integrate their business processes, applications and services. If 2021 was the year of the Zero Day, 2022 will be the year of Zero Trust. According to the Okta zero trust report, 82% of European organisations have increased their Zero Trust budgets in 2021. Looking ahead, zero trust adoption will extend across more private organisations and governments to counter the growing threat landscape. I can’t say it any better than Eric O’Neill, national security strategist, VMware, who says: “In 2021, defenders caught the highest number of Zero Days ever recorded. We saw a massive proliferation of hacking tools, vulnerabilities, and attack capabilities on the Dark Web. As a response, 2022 will be the year of Zero Trust where organizations ‘verify everything’ vs. trusting it’s safe. Governments and organizations will adopt a Zero Trust mindset with the assumption that they will eventually be breached. A Zero Trust approach will be a key element to fending off attacks in 2022.”?

5.?ESG

With COP26, how nations address sustainability became a universal issue in 2021, propelled by an increasingly environmentally conscious citizen. Organisations, including VMware in collaboration with our partners and customers, are now proactively and positively contributing to issues from climate crisis and sustainability, through to boardroom and workplace diversity and equality, to how supply chains are managed. I see organisations taking a closer view of their supply chains to ensure the integrity of them. I also believe we will see much greater focus on ESG overall, more overt and more ingrained into company culture, but also when it comes to providing detailed and transparent company reporting. A recent report from Morningstar showed that there were at least 34 regulatory bodies and standard setters across 12 markets undertaking official consultations on ESG in 2021 alone. The quality and volume of ESG data will grow, and the CIO/IT dept will have a key role in making this happen. Moving forward we need countries and regulators to co-operate and make it far easier for companies to conform to the standards and expectations outlined by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) and the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR).?

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6.??Cloud smart

One of the major takeaways from the pandemic is that organisations don’t want to compromise on innovation or control when it comes to their choice of clouds. This is going to determine the way businesses invest and use the cloud into 2022 and beyond. VMware research found that 75% of enterprises today are relying on two or more public clouds, while 40% of our customers are already using three or more public clouds in addition to their own on-premises cloud. There is no doubt that multi-cloud is here to stay but to deliver today’s modern apps businesses need to be ‘cloud smart’ and not always ‘cloud-first’ or ‘this-cloud-only’. Our approach is in delivering the multi-cloud platform for all of an organisation’s applications, wherever they want them deployed. Doing so will unlock the full potential of multi-cloud. Indeed, the VMware Digital Momentum Study 2021 found that companies that have taken this approach have seen; a 35% revenue increase from faster modern app delivery, 41% fewer costs and hours spent on IT infrastructure and 35% productivity savings across a distributed workforce. Now more than ever businesses want control of their destiny while being future proofed with the ability to modernise the old and keep pace with the new, and to be able to take full advantage of all technology options in the future.?

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7.?Digital and cloud sovereignty

2022 will see more developments around data sovereignty and protection. We’ve already seen the UK Government consult on changes it’s proposing to regulate in this area, while within Europe, projects like GAIA-X seek to establish standards to create a sovereign cloud for the region, with the intention of making it easier for businesses to store and manage their data physically in Europe. In doing so, the aim is to increase Europe’s digital self-sufficiency. According to IDC, by 2024, 50% of European organizations will spend 10% of their ICT budget to cover additional costs to adhere to digital sovereignty principles adopted in the EU, while analyst firm Forrester Research is predicting an "era of cloud nationalism will emerge" in 2022. A move evidenced by a report that digital regulation and tech sovereignty will be among France’s digital priorities when it takes over the rotating EU Council presidency in the first half of 2022. Looking at the Middle East and into Africa, we’re already seeing moves to this effect too. Egypt, for instance, approved the Personal Data Protection Law No. 151 in February 2020, which prohibits the transfer of personal data to recipients located outside Egypt except with the permission of their Data Protection Center. Also, in 2020, the Saudi National Cybersecurity Authority (NCA) released a draft document for Cloud Cybersecurity Controls (CCC), which sets the minimum cybersecurity requirements for cloud computing.?

8. Partnerships

If, as a collective, we can harness the power of data in the European economy the results have the potential to be staggering. To provide a degree of scale, the value of the data economy of the EU27 is predicted to be more than €550 billion by 2025, representing 4 % of the overall EU GDP, according to the Final Study Report: The European Data Market Monitoring Tool. But fundamental to realizing this impact is the move to the cloud. Europe will simply not reach its digital sovereignty potential without the appropriate cloud infrastructure structure in place to reduce expenditure in IT, drive application modernisation and increase data portability and reversibility. This highlights the value and potential of partnerships which will become even more valuable, as is our 2,000+-strong VMware Cloud Provider Program (VCPP) in Europe- a global ecosystem of service providers, all united with one ubiquitous, digital platform. We have a lot of valuable data and insights in Europe to make the most of.

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The world is moving at a pace never seen before and, combined with fluctuating macro conditions and the global pandemic, ‘normal’ will continue to be redefined and technology will continue to play an enabling role in helping people, companies, Governments, nations and societies to thrive.