Business operations have been quite unpredictable for the last couple of years, making it challenging to predict what might happen next and how the IT industry will be affected by certain developments. Experts from Citrix, LogicMonitor, Confluent, OpenText, Zuora, Denodo, McAfee Enterprise, NTT, Delphix, CyberRes and Endava take a look at some of the trends they expect to develop over the coming year and how this will impact the technology landscape.
It’s no surprise that digital investment boomed in 2021, with the UK’s tech sector raising over £13.5 billion in the first half of the year alone – more than triple that period in 2020.
Now we are in a new year, it’s time to reflect on what we have learnt and what to carry forward over the months to come. With the demand for digital stronger than ever, what technologies are likely to take centre stage and how can businesses best utilise them? We spoke to a number of leading experts to get their views.
Christian Reilly, Vice President, Technology Strategy, Citrix
Heading into 2022, there is no new normal, but rather a new now. Organisations will continue the journey into a technology-powered future where ‘normal’ will be represented by a state of constant change and evolution, and where ‘now’ reflects any given day on the path. And the focus will be a balance between the two.
In some cases, we could think of it as a form of consolidation vs. expansion. For example, infrastructure technologies and processes that were hurried into place will evolve on a steady plane to become more mature. Application technologies will continue to provide choice for line of business and simplicity for users. Cloud and hybrid cloud strategies will become even more critical.
Adam Young, Senior Manager, Sales Engineering, EMEA, LogicMonitor
Leveraging the power of prediction in AIOps will be the key to success. Legacy IT systems are complex, decentralised and slow. To make matters worse, the exponential increase in complexity brought about by remote working has left IT departments grappling with outdated systems. The ability to manage complexity, however, ultimately requires technology that is capable of handling it, and AIOps does just that.
As we emerge from the worst of the pandemic, competition is fierce. Organisations that fail to leverage the power of prediction in AIOps will get left behind.
Peter Reeve, VP Northern EMEA, Confluent
2022 will be a year of war over skills, talent and workplace culture. The massively competitive market for talent is not going to change and supply issues will continue. Businesses talk about how they need to lower the dependency on unique technical skills and deploy them to the highest value tasks. This means engineers not managing things like data infrastructure, when they could be building the next great application for customers.
Anthony Di Bello, Vice President, Strategic Development, OpenText
The continued rapidly changing face of the cyberthreat landscape coupled with a confusing, fast-moving cyberdefence vendor landscape forces even the largest companies to rethink their ability and appetite to maintain cyber operations in-house. While I expect to see organisations retain control of traditional, tried and true front line defences such as enterprise antivirus and firewalls, most if not all technology and processes associated with maintaining a mature Security Operations Centre will start to move outside the organisation. Companies will see a benefit in a partner more able to maintain a modern security solution stack, assist in evaluating and adjusting defence posture on an ongoing basis and better allow organisations to focus time and effort on their core business.
John Phillips, GM, Zuora
The Anything-as-a-Service market will continue to grow. In 2022, we’ll see an increasing number of high-tech companies shifting to the Anything-as-a-Service model. During the pandemic, many businesses were forced to undergo drastic Digital Transformation at never-before-seen speed. Add to this the growing adoption of cloud-based monitoring and the demand for scalable storage services and it’s no wonder IDC predicted that by 2024, 51% of total software revenue will be from the SaaS delivery model.
In order to truly make the most of this emerging market, tech companies need to pivot from subscriber acquisition to subscriber retention. They will need to use subscriber data in order to glean business insights and improve the overall experience for subscribers. Ensuring the right blend of flexibility, convenience and customisation through subscription-based models has never been more important. These are the areas that are likely to set SaaS companies apart and encourage that coveted brand loyalty long-term.
Charles Southwood, Regional VP, Denodo
In 2022 and beyond, larger organisations with distributed data environments will implement a data mesh architecture to minimise data silos, avoid duplication of effort and ensure consistency. Data mesh will create a unified infrastructure enabling domains to create and share data products while enforcing standards for interoperability, quality, governance and security. It will drive more self-service data infrastructures and an increasing use of models using Data-as-a-Service.
Fabien Rech, EMEA Vice President, McAfee Enterprise
Our reliance on API-based services is rising as they quickly become the foundations of most modern applications. This is only set to rise further in 2022, as global use of the Internet, 5G and connected devices continues to boom – last year alone we saw a 57% increase in online activity.
It’s therefore critical that enterprises make API security a priority this year. Organisations must ensure they have visibility of all application usage across their systems, with the ability to look at consumed APIs. Adopting a Zero Trust mindset will support this. It allows enterprises to maintain control over access to the network and all its instances, including applications and APIs, and restrict them if necessary.
Rory Duncan, Security Go To Market Leader UK, NTT
Last year, as we began to recover from the pandemic, demonstrating effective cyber-resilience became more crucial than ever. This will continue to be a priority for organisations as we move further into 2022, as the shift towards permanent hybrid working models for many enterprises will put continued pressure on their ability to detect threats. It’s essential that business leaders prioritise security, especially as the trusted perimeter expands to encompass remote users.
As businesses consider their 2022 hybrid workplace strategies, they need to revisit and re-evaluate security from the ground up and assess where they may have unwittingly created gaps in their security armour.
Pritesh Parekh, VP of Engineering and Chief Trust & Security Officer, Delphix
With intense scrutiny on how businesses prepare for and respond to breaches, it’s clear that security and compliance concerns will be the key determinant for any interactions with third parties – whether customers, partners, or vendors. Following the pandemic, digital guides every third-party interaction – potentially exposing data as soon it moves outside of the business’ digital walls. Endpoints have become beyond critical when it comes to securing data, but you can’t always control your endpoints if they exist within another organisation, right? The answer is, you must, meaning that technology vendors who don’t rise to the occasion and implement the same standards as their enterprise customers will lose business, big time.
Stephan Jou, CTO Security Analytics, Interset, CyberRes (a Micro Focus Line of Business)
All indications are that AI technologies will be increasingly prevalent in cybersecurity. However, the types of AI that will be adopted in 2022 will be focused on specific, battle-tested techniques such as statistical learning, anomaly detection and (in a more limited capacity) NLP. Certain areas of AI research, such as large language models (like GPT-3), will not be heavily adopted in 2022 for cybersecurity. This is because there is not yet a good use case match within cybersecurity for those technologies and also because the computationally expensive and non-transparent nature of these approaches do not lend themselves well to the SOC needs at present.
Helena Nimmo, CIO, Endava
2022 will be a year of acceptance and experimentation. Companies are more comfortable with the idea of pilots and small-scale deployments. Innovation and failure are two sides of the same coin, so expect a number of trials and errors as companies find the model that fits them, but ultimately a far more innovative and differentiated market. We have been Zooming into meetings for nearly two years now. We have a generation of confident digital employees who feel able to challenge traditional structures and are less willing to accept a working model that does not meet their needs.
Innovation, acceleration and adaption will be the driving forces behind how businesses operate and deliver over the coming year.
