Technology Trends for 2022

We have witnessed unprecedented digital transformation this year. The disruption and impact of the pandemic have been the catalyst for driving massive technology and social shifts that are creating important new opportunities for businesses across the world. Pervasive disruption to established revenue models of the enterprises through technology led start-ups and the realization to the importance of climate change and sustainability continue to be key drivers in further accelerating digital transformation.?

Transformation as multi-stage change is here to stay… Standing still in this era of continuous innovation just isn’t an option.

Businesses that are adopting a digital first mindset will continue to thrive and leapfrog ahead of competition. In your role as the CIO, CDIO or an IT leader, the responsibility for supporting the technical end of digital business rests squarely on your shoulders.

To support you in fostering more innovation and go from silo'd to seamless, today I am pleased to publish Technology trends for 2022, an opinionated view of where we see the opportunities for growth. These innovations will deliver Digital Growth, Rapid Scaling and Accelerated Innovation. The one critical question you have to ask yourself - does your digital strategy embrace these force-multiplying technology trends to accelerate growth and strategically drive your organization forward?

Digital Growth

In an interconnected world, any disruption is felt across the entire ecosystem, leading to more volatility, challenges, and opportunities. Survival is linked not to size or strength but to resilience and the ability to change.

The potential of cloud is truly unlocked when cloud is adopted as both a technology platform and an operational model, jointly enabling agility and responsiveness for the business.

This requires changes in skill sets, processes, and organizational structures, bringing together IT and business to deliver agility and responsiveness. To continue to grow digitally, businesses will need to invest in continuous modernization, trusted digital connections and sustainability through continuous optimization.

Trend 1: Continuous Modernization

Enterprises have focused the first wave of cloud transformation on rapid data center exit through lifting and shifting applications into the cloud. While the promise of the cloud is infinite scale and reduced time to market, without further modernization these applications continue to limit business agility. Neither have these applications proven to run cost optimally, nor have they become easier to change however they continue to push up ongoing operational expenses.

Every new application one day will become legacy!

Modernizing applications by digitally decoupling legacy with modern components, embracing open architectures, infusing AI and embracing cloud centric blueprints brings value to the business by increased competitiveness and the ability to outflank competitors. Business representatives must continue to work with Technology teams to triage the portfolio of applications for viability of modernization through 7R assessments and establish a roadmap for evolving this portfolio for the evergreen innovation delivered through cloud platforms.

Trend 2: Cyber security Mesh

Modern architectures are pushing more data processing to the edge, and many rely on multiple cloud implementations and datacenters to make their businesses run smoothly. Fully centralized IT networks may be a thing of the past, but many enterprises are still clinging to their old ways.

According to the UK government - 40% of businesses suffered cyber attacks in 2021 but quarter of business and charities suffered attacks on a weekly basis, source – cyber security breaches survey 2021 .?

The cybersecurity mesh is a distributed architectural approach to interoperable, composable, scalable, flexible, and reliable cyber controls that span across cloud, on-premises, and edge devices. Cybersecurity mesh strongly aligns with the zero-trust network philosophy, whereby any device is by default not trusted to access the broader network. Perimeter-focused security often fails because majority of the data leaks and breaches originate on the inside of the network itself. As the pandemic continues to push us to virtual first architectures and hybrid work patterns technology teams will need to step up investment in enriching cyber security mesh that scales as volume of applications and data grows.

Trend 3: FinOps

Over 47% of CIO’s site cost optimization as a key factor in the move to the cloud.

Yet $13 Billion has been reported as wasted cloud spend in over provisioned and underutilized cloud workloads in 2021.

Underpinning the success of cloud is a new economic model that replaces capital purchases with operating expenses. In the cloud, infrastructure services are charged on a consumption basis — you only pay for what you use. While the principles of cloud economics are compelling, not every organization is reaping the benefits. New workload types in the cloud offer more optimal pricing, security and performance, in most cases reducing overall cost of ownership, FinOps provides both the governance model and tooling to automate policy-driven observability, governance and reporting. The state of FinOps Report 2021 show that more than half of businesses have little or no automation capability in the cloud. More businesses will look to invest in FinOps as it provides a way of reducing ongoing cloud spend, driving modernization and supporting the move towards carbon neutrality.

Rapid Scaling

With the trusted foundation in place, the next focus is technologies that enable the organization to scale its digitalization efforts. Future success no longer relies on imagining what the future will look like or scrambling to adjust to immediate disruptions but rather on continuous innovation in response to "every moment" challenges and opportunities. To thrive in this jungle of agile innovation.

Organizations need to accelerate velocity of enabling digital technologies, software, AI, and cloud, which fundamentally democratize access to the building blocks for innovation.

Trend 4: Hyper automation Rise of Citizen development

As organizations grow, traditional manual management can’t scale at the same rate. Shadow IT sprawl has resulted in short term velocity with a trade-off of long-term technical debt through enterprise systems taking dependencies on spreadsheets and access databases. Empowering business users with Low code platforms has enabled a citizen development movement that’s helping businesses to identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible.?Every organization needs to see augmented application development with no-code/low-code platforms as a viable opportunity to empower a continuum of developer skill sets.

Low code platforms, such as Microsoft Power Platform, will take center stage with more than 50% of net new applications will be developed using No Code/ Low code platforms.

Businesses need to find the right intersection point between Lo code and Pro code (such as AI/ML) to then industrialize the solution by leveraging the scale provided through secure cloud platforms.

Trend 5: Cloud native platforms (CNP)

Application and Data workloads that are designed for the cloud take advantage of the elasticity and scalability of cloud computing to deliver faster time to value. CNP also drives a loosely coupled architecture paradigm that advocates an event driven architecture with an API first mindset taking center stage. GitOps as a way of managing the platform lifecycle truly allows for faster recovery from failure but also pushes into the direction of autonomous services. Cloud native platforms will continue to see intense innovation in the open source and a growing ecosystem of tools to aid adoption.

As reported by Gartner, by 2025 cloud native platforms will serve as the foundation for more than 95% of new digital initiatives – up from less than 40% in 2021.

Trend 6: Composable applications

In an environment of the rapid pace of changes in business and technology, constantly updating and maintaining the legacy and monolithic applications have become a bottleneck for organizations. Modular lego bricks known as Composable applications is the next-gen application and software development model that disrupts the way the applications are designed, developed, supported, and managed at large.

Composable applications are built from business-centric modular components delivering applications that are centralized around APIs, Event and Microservices to increase business efficiency.

The key to this is an evolutionary architecture that’s build on top of the well architected framework . By adopting composable applications, organisations can iteratively update the components in their application blocks separately from the entire application stack. Businesses will find this practice maintains the efficiency of each application thus improve the overall effectiveness of the portfolio.

Trend 7: Data Fabric?

Insight-driven enterprises have an edge over others. Modern enterprises are trying to become data-driven organizations and get more business value out of their data.

The value of data continuous to be limited through the silos of data architectures and organizational structures.

Data fabric is foundational to enable reducing time to insights - it integrates data across platforms and users, making data available everywhere it’s needed. Data fabric elevates the value of your enterprise data by providing users access to the right data just in time, regardless of where it is stored.

This architecture is agnostic to data environments, data processes, data use, geography and tools, while integrating core data management capabilities. It automates data discovery, governance and consumption, delivering business-ready data for analytics and AI. Businesses will look to make investment in data fabric as a way of consolidating data platforms to drive better AI and ML in decision making. Data fabric reduces time for integration design, deployment and maintenance because the technology designs draw on the ability to use/reuse and combine different data integration styles.

Accelerating Innovation

The velocity of connectedness has changed how people socialize, shop, learn, work, and collaborate, creating a rich, seamless, immediate, and interoperable experience, regardless of the location of people and data.

To thrive with innovation and become a truly digital business enterprises need to shift from traditional, linear processes that start and end in the organization toward platform-based, data-driven value chains that link employees, customers and external partner ecosystems.

This enables the network effect of ecosystem economics to generate new value beyond the organization or technology itself. These technologies exemplify the IT force multipliers that will win business and market share.

Trend 8: Total Experience

Total experience is a business strategy that aims to create a better, holistic experience for everyone who engages with a brand including customers, employees, users and partners. Human centric design and design led thinking aren’t only techniques of use when thinking about customer instead a toolset that needs to be central to all design experiences.?

No experience operates in a vacuum! Employee experience impacts customer experience, User experience impacts employee experience.?

The goal is to interconnect and enhance each of these for a more holistic overall experience for all stakeholders.?Organizations will need to transform business models to achieve world class customer and employee advocacy level, the start of which will come by breaking the experience silos.

Trend 9: Intelligence on Demand

The pandemic has shown us how advanced nations have paved the path to normality by leading with data intelligence.

Many organizations are drowning in data they are collecting but not using, focusing on the immediacy, not the importance, of data.

Delivering intelligence where and when it's needed poses new challenges especially in the wake of issues with bias and misuse, surveillance, invasions of privacy, government interventions, regulations, and antitrust actions. Decision Intelligence is fueled by one vital asset – data. Businesses need to strike the balance and harness data, AI, and learning will achieve an asymmetrical advantage in the market, benefiting from superior predictions, improved engagement, processes, operations, enterprise decision making, and resilience, while safeguarding customer data and privacy.?

Trend 10: Augmented Human Experience

Instead of focusing on return-of-in-person and return-to-work policies, visionary business leaders are joining forces to develop elevated virtual first experiences. Metaverse promises to deliver virtual first infrastructure layer made possible through the convergence of the digital and physical worlds. By combining the Internet of Things, AI, and mixed reality, this platform layer enables the creation of rich digital twin simulations of real-world processes, places, and things so organizations can monitor complex systems in real time, interact within them using mixed reality, and run simulations to model, analyze, and predict performance.

Increasingly Businesses across all sectors will need virtual-first, remote-first architectural approach to digitize consumer touchpoints and build out experiences to support people and products.

Summary

A new future is on the horizon – one that’s different from what the world expected. Big changes today require bold leadership and prioritizing technology investments.

It’s not just about fixing the business, but upending convention and creating a new vision for the future. As this future takes shape, there will be no room for enterprises that cling to the past. Understanding, participating in, and provisioning the digital ecosystem that will sustain, advance, and scale business and operations are essential for every enterprise. Leave a comment for any questions or feedback.

Credits

Special thanks to Paul Brown, Nick Main, Nick Pribyl and Bhashit Trivedi for reviewing and improving this article.

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