Technology research firm Gartner released their annual list of top strategic technology trends, which predicts major boosts in AI and automation capabilities, as well as an industry-wide increase in Cybersecurity and IT spending.
The firm presented its findings at the IT Symposium/Xpo Americas and stated that the biggest overarching focus for businesses will be finding ways to establish direct digital connections with their users while scaling technology.
AI Gets an Upgrade
By now, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is widely established across the tech sector, but Gartner expects the next generation of this technology to take center stage over the next several years. Generative Artificial Intelligence only produces 1 percent of all data, but Gartner expects it will produce ten times that by 2025. The technique differentiates itself from regular AI and Machine Learning by forming an understanding of content or objects and then using that to generate all-new artifacts. This tech has applications across software development, targeted marketing, fraud detection and ID theft, and more.
The rise in AI will be driven by AI Engineering, with 10 percent of firms predicted to have dedicated AI Engineering best practices in place by mid-decade. This will cause a three-fold boost in the value of their AI projects. Some of the advancements expected to come out of this boom include Autonomic Systems—often taking the form of robots and drones—and Decision Intelligence, which organizations will use to model outcomes on how decisions are made and gain a competitive advantage.
IT Takes to the Clouds
Cloud Native Platforms (CNP) are technologies that allow for the building of new application architectures that are resilient, elastic, and agile. They enable users to respond to rapid digital change, and we can expect to see a lot more of them, according to the firm. As remote and hybrid work environments become the norm over office-based setups, this type of tech will play a major role in the creation of geographically dispersed data infrastructure. Gartner predicts that 75 percent of distributed organizations’ growth will exceed non-distributed organizations by 2023, with CNP’s supporting 95 percent of digital initiatives by 2025.
Another major upheaval in the IT space will be the adoption of Data Fabric, which provides flexible integration of data sources across platforms and business users and serves as another solution for connecting a widely distributed remote workforce. Data management can be reduced by up to 70 percent with this technology and undo existing silo-based architectures. Overall, Gartner predicts increases in IT spending ranging from 2.1 percent to 11.5 percent in the enterprise software, IT services, data center systems, devices, and communications services industries.
Privacy Laws to Make Major Impact
Recent clashes between big tech and governments across the world have almost all involved issues of privacy, so this remains a top-of-mind concern for consumers. On the legislation side, Gartner expects 75 percent of the world to be covered by some type of privacy law with built-in subject right requests and consent by 2023. The onus will then fall on companies to implement privacy management automation in order to make complying feasible. They also predict a subsequent consolidation in cloud and security edge services, with 30 percent of enterprises adopting cloud-delivered SWG, CASB, ZTNA, and FWaaS capabilities from the same vendor by 2023.
In the mid-to-later half of the 2020s, cybersecurity concerns will remain high. With the increasing adoption of legislation around ransomware and dedicated cyber committees, it’s expected that there will be qualified board members overseeing cybersecurity at 40 percent of companies by 2025. A promising tech for the reduction of the financial impact of security incidents is cybersecurity mesh architecture. This is a flexible technique that integrates widely distributed and disparate security services, allowing them to work together to improve security and move control points closer to assets they’re designed to protect. It integrates across cloud and non-cloud environments, with the ability to verify identity, context, and policy adherence.
To explore Gartner’s top strategic technology trends for 2022 further, visit their website.
