IT Trends You Don’t Want to Miss

The COVID pandemic has redefined the workplace and accelerated the process of digitization for many. Organizations are migrating to systems that are flexible, distributed and resilient.  

Per Gartner, IT spending will reach $3.9 trillion worldwide in 2021. IT teams will be channeling investments into enterprise software as remote work becomes essential. Systems that support remote work will see a growth of 8.8 percent this year. 

Rising investment indicates that organizations are becoming future ready, adopting technologies that allow them to move away from centralized operations. This post will present six trends that IT professionals should know in 2021. 

1. Managing Cloud

Cloud technology has revolutionized the world of digital transformation and is here to stay. Organizations are moving their data to the cloud to leverage modern applications and analytics. 

Moving to the cloud means moving critical services from on-premises to Amazon Web Services (AWS) or other cloud service providers. IT teams can remotely manage infrastructures without enduring inconvenience and high maintenance costs. Cloud migration provides flexibility and allows businesses to scale up or down based on their requirements.

A relatively new model is the “distributed cloud.” Distributed cloud computing provides service near an organization’s physical location. This is preferred by location-dependent organizations that require data to reside closer to where business activities happen.

2. Pushing Cybersecurity to the Forefront

The U.S. experienced an unprecedented number of cyberattacks in 2020. The rise of attacks and the concurrent expansion of cloud services has forced organizations to reconsider their cybersecurity strategy. 

As organizational assets move outside of traditional security boundaries, Gartner outlines a new security approach called the “cybersecurity mesh.” A cybersecurity mesh is defined as, “[An] architectural approach to scalable, flexible and reliable security control.”

Per Gartner, “[The mesh] enables a more modular, responsive security approach by centralizing policy orchestration and distributing policy enforcement.” The cybersecurity mesh is expected to enhance cybersecurity processes and measures.

3. Anywhere Operations Model

The “anywhere operations” model is another IT trend that is gaining traction today. Gartner’s latest report defines anywhere operations as, “[An] operating model designed to support customers everywhere, enable employees everywhere and manage the deployment of business services across distributed infrastructures.”

The shift toward a more distributed workflow, influenced by remote-work culture, has prompted this change. It is projected that in the next three years, 40 percent of organizations will offer anywhere operations to employees. This will deliver a blended experience between in-office and remote work.

4. Immersive Technologies (AR/VR)

Social distancing is the new norm, and purveyors of physical experiences are increasingly adopting augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) systems to enable sales. Once defined as good-to-have systems, AR/VR technologies are now prevalent during the current health crisis.

More retailers are uploading 3D models to their product landing pages, and they are leveraging AR technology to allow consumers to visualize furniture at home. AR/VR technologies provide a new, safe experience for buyers and sellers.

IT teams must recognize the boundless potential of AR/VR technology and leverage it to create new service opportunities. It is the time to bring these technologies together with existing infrastructures to achieve business goals. 

5. Artificial Intelligence

IT teams are leveraging technologies that use big data and machine learning algorithms to accelerate the identification and remediation of issues. Through artificial intelligence (AI), technicians can resolve incidents quickly before they impact an organization’s critical business processes. 

The DevOps environment is complex and requires technology stacks to monitor and manage workflows. With many systems generating large amounts of data every second, it becomes impossible to analyze and gain actionable insights. AI helps DevOps engineers detect anomalies in systems and suggests remedies to bring them back to normal. DevOps teams can spend less time on resolving incidents and channel more time into delivering high-quality products.

Another significant application of AI arises in the realm of AI-driven ELT data pipelines, where these pipelines streamline data processing to facilitate efficient insight extraction from diverse sources and enhance workflow optimization, enabling teams to extract, load, and transform data into a structured format, thereby empowering organizations to harness data for analytics, reporting, and informed decision-making.

6. Hyperautomation

Hyperautomation eliminates repetitive, mundane tasks to allow organizations to focus on more valuable matters. It uses advanced technologies such as AI, machine learning and robotic automation to accelerate processes. 

Hyperautomation’s use case extends to IT service alerting (ITSA). IT teams, such as network operation centers (NOCs) and security operation centers (SOCs), can leverage automated ITSA solutions to orchestrate notifications across on-call teams. On-call technicians are immediately notified of major outages, enabling them to resolve the incidents promptly. Real-time alerts are triggered based on on-call schedules, routing rules and alert escalation policies. 

ITSA solutions can be integrated with IT service management (ITSM) systems, remote monitoring (RMM) and cybersecurity tools. These powerful integrations help teams to triage and resolve time-sensitive incidents.

Automation is also used to optimize live call routing workflows. When a caller needs IT support, they dial a dedicated phone number to reach an on-call technician. If the first technician does not respond, automation escalates the call to the next on-call engineer. IT teams can perfect their after-hour operations using these automated, real-time systems.

Conclusion

As the pandemic pushes employers to reimagine their IT infrastructure and workflows, IT teams will have to adopt modern technologies to support this new paradigm. The six trends discussed in this post are steppingstones to enabling flexible and resilient work environments.