10 Strategic Technology Trends Businesses Should Plan for in 2021

Information technology is an ever-evolving field where organizations are exploring specific technology trends, and CxOs are striving to adopt the changing scenarios to compose a better future for the business.

Gartner's research president Brian Burke has grouped organizational strategic technology trends into three different categories - people centricity, location independence, and resilient delivery. He also suggests organizational plasticity is the key to strategic tech trends.

The primary concern during this ongoing pandemic, is how companies will leverage those technology trends to gain organizational plasticity. We hope the below discussion will help you choose the action.   

1. Rising Demand for AI Engineering

In this tragic situation, AI has become much more useful for us to understand and view the future world in a different way. Starting from the giant MNCs, all the way to small and mid-based, organizations are now focusing on AI technology for improving customer experience, managing extensive data from multiple sources, and modernizing business strategies.

This trend is associated with providing engineering discipline to an organization because, according to Gartner research, only 53%* of projects build into production from artificial intelligence (AI) prototypes. Now it is really bringing the engineering discipline to AI for end-user organizations.

Burke has also mentioned big sellers have been delivering successfully over the past several years, but end-user companies need to move away from the experimental phase with AI and move to a stronger delivery model that is only possible through AI engineering. DevOps, DataOps, and ModelOps are three core pillars of AI engineering. A robust engineering strategy will facilitate the performance, scalability, and reliability of organizations with better ROI.

2. Driving Innovation Using Cloud-Native Technologies 

Emerging cloud-native technologies are born from open sources and incubated in public clouds that drive fast innovation by connecting more global locations. IT leaders and CIOs are predicting cloud-native technologies and cloud computing platforms such as serverless computing, Kubernetes, and container platforms will introduce a new era of distributed enterprise software from software vendors, cloud providers, and edge providers.

3. Moving Cloud Strategies Towards the Edge

In 2020, Interest in edge computing has been historically tied to the Internet of Things. Innovations in next-generation communications, edge computing architectures, and cloud-native technologies have combined to create breakthroughs in cloud-to-edge integration.

Over the next three to five years, the situation is going to be challenging for public cloud vendor market dominance because firms will shift their cloud strategy to include more edge services from more vendors.

4. Moving Towards Anywhere Operation

Another strategic trend is an anywhere operation that introduces an updated IT operational model. This new operating model enables employees to work virtually everywhere, supports customers everywhere, and manages the deployment of business services across a distributed infrastructure. Cloud CRM is now playing a leading role in connecting customers from different geographic locations, as well as enabling employee performance with support and better security solutions.

As per Gartner’s prediction, by the end of 2023, 40%* of organizations will have applied anywhere operations to deliver better optimization and blended physical and virtual employee experiences.

5. Internet of Behaviors

In Gartner’s 2019 tech prediction, the Internet of Behavior was the first time coined as an emerging trend of technology. This trend affirms how organizations, whether the government or the private sectors, are leveraging technology to monitor the behavioral pattern and manage data to upgrade or downgrade the experience to influence those.

Gartner’s research president Burke has termed it as “digital dust” in human life and predicted by 2025, half of the world population will be subject to at least one IoB program. Facial recognition, big data, and location tracking are some examples of IoB.

6. Low-Code and Hybrid Development

Any software application required a responsible and dedicated team of full-stack software developers and architects. But the growing demand for low-code development framework has changed the concept of enterprise application in 2020. Now companies are leveraging citizen developers with pre-packaging templates and graphic design solutions and looking at the potential revolution through a low-code platform.

IT professionals are now also adopting cross-platform development frameworks for using a single code across multiple platforms. It will avert the company from prolonging the project due to code development and platform customization. This platform is now a blessing for small and medium business owners as this immensely trims down your development costs, and reusable code is applicable for the deployment of both Android and iOS apps. The organizations are seeking rapid development using hybrid development because it is the cheapest option, and the development process requires less time.

7. Rise of Internet of Things (IoT)

Around the world number of IoT-connected devices is projected to increase to 43** billion by 2023, an almost threefold increase from 2018. This steady uptake is both a result and an impetus of the developing technologies that underpin the IoT.

The proliferation of devices and advanced principal technologies have worked as a fuel in the growth of IoT technologies. In fact, according to the IDC forecast, investments in IoT technology will grow at 13.6** percent per year through 2022. In the coming future, we will thank new sensors, more computing power, and reliable mobile connectivity for making every task simple and continue a consistent growth.

8. Cybersecurity Mesh

The cybersecurity mesh enables people to access any digital security asset wherever the property is or where the person is located. Previously security professionals thought about the internal security of the organization, then confirmed that everything outside the organization is protected inside the organization, inside the firewall through the security
system. But today's situation has changed a lot.

Burke explained; with more digital assets outside the firewall, especially the cloud, and more remote employees, the scope of the security perimeter needs to be around someone. It also needs to be enforced through a cloud access security broker so that policy enforcement is done at the asset itself. Its unique approach centers around the identity of a person or thing to define the security perimeter.

The Centralized policy orchestration and policy enforcement will facilitate to pull off cyber limitations and secure external and internal system security.

9. Digital User Experience (DX) Strategy

Digital user-experience (DX) is a strategic trend that targets an immensely virtual lifestyle. DX is about how intuitive a webpage or app is, how effectively users can complete their tasks, and how well integrated the product is with other applications.

The opportunity of DX has expanded a lot as the sophistication of online environments has matured enough and manifolded beyond a webpage to encompass wearables as well as applications incorporate with virtual reality and augmented reality.

It accomplishes the involvement of an employee, customer, user, along with the existent multi-experience data. This way, we can generate customer loyalty with effectiveness, improves conversion rates, as well as creates the appropriate customer-to-company circle that can be further utilized in business development and planning.

10. Recasting the Road of Automation

COVID-19 has changed firms’ automation agendas rapidly towards back-office processes and business resilience. Over the past few years, we have seen robotic process automation has been the star technology that companies have focused on doing. But what we are seeing now is that it is shifted from task-based automation to process-based automation.

Hence, it becomes easy to automate several tasks in a process, to do functional automation across multiple processes, and move towards digital process automation with pragmatic AI and low-code tools. As a result, request backlogs from business stakeholders have prompted more than
70%*** of businesses to undertake dozens of hyper-automation initiatives.

Conclusion

We all are aware of the present situation and well diverse with the struggle of every industry. We are going to come out from the pandemic and moving forward to a different trajectory for the business establishment in the future. Now is the time to anticipate the right trajectory for your organization that will guide you to emerge from the pandemic.

The above trends are striving to bring global organizations, clients as well as people closer in a much more effective way. Software services companies are here to help you navigate through the different trajectories.

References:

• *Maddox. T (2020) Top tech trends for 2021: Gartner predicts hyperautomation, AI and more will dominate business technology Retrieved from Techrepublic.com
• ** Dahlqvist. F, Patel. M, Rajko. A, and Shulma. J (2019) Growing opportunities in the Internet of Things Retrieved from McKinsey.com
• ***CIO&Leader (2020) Top Strategic Tech Trends For 2021 Retrieved from CioandLeader.com