Top four technology trends for 2021
Computing gazes into its crystal ball and outlines what it expects to be the big ticket items on IT leaders' agendas in 2021, including remote working, cyber security challenges, enterprise open source and automation
2020 was all about the pandemic. We had sudden mass remote working which created immediate issues with security, with Bring Your Own Device evolving into Bring Your Own Office, network bandwidth issues with massively increased video calls, legacy problems with fewer people around to manage on premise kit, and it was a real test for Disaster Recovery solutions and processes.
Organisations which had already invested heavily in cloud tended to fare better, especially in the early days of lockdown while everyone was frantically working to pivot quickly to remote working. These firms mostly could seamlessly enable staff to connect to critical systems from their homes. Others had to scramble to provide alternatives and workarounds. But one of the trends we saw was firms massively accelerating their cloud programmes. Some brought forward their O365 rollouts by several years. Others very quickly found their Unified Communications and video conferencing platforms to be not up to the task, and quickly moved, often to Zoom, one of the big winners of the early phase of lockdown.
Well we're in December now, somehow. So what's going to happen in 2021, what does the future look like in IT?
Continued remote working
Whilst various vaccines are well on the way, next year will still very much be defined by the pandemic.
Vanishingly few people want a return to the office-based nine-to-five.
We'll continue to see uncertainty around employee location and the continued need to enable mass remote working. Even once vaccines become widely distributed, the home working trend is set to continue, and I'm trying hard not to use the phrase ‘the new normal'.
We've spoken to lots of people over the year, and have spotted a real disparity and disconnect between what the C-Suite wants from a post-Covid world, and what everyone else wants. As we discussed in one of our recent Delta workshops, vanishingly few people want a return to the office-based nine-to-five. They've enjoyed the flexibility 2020 has brought and are very reluctant to give it up.
CEOs on the other hand, have paid good money for office facilities, and want to see bums back on seats as soon as possible. Productivity has largely remained high by most counts throughout lockdown, but not quite as high as it was before. Effective communication both ways between the C-Suite and the rest of the business will be key to managing the transition to whatever mode of working each organisation adopts if and when Covid is beaten.
CIOs and managers of all kinds will do well to have an honest and open dialogue with staff about what they want. If people are forced back into any form of presentee-ism, the best people will walk, seeking a more flexible employer much as pre-lockdown they used to seek a more generous one.
One factor which will be slightly different will be people's tolerance. That means their tolerance of poor online access to systems, poor user experiences and dodgy video calls. What was acceptable in the first few months of lockdown will be seen as remiss as we approach a year of Covid.
So if you haven't already, the Christmas period could be a good time to take stock of a few key online services to canvass user opinion and see if they're up to scratch.
Remote working is here to stay
AI-enhanced Security and zero trust
One area which has seen a lot coverage in 2020 is security. Cyber attacks have increased in frequency over lockdown for lots of reasons. Many organisations have seen an increase in ransomware attacks, public sector and higher education institutions especially.
One reason for this is that, quite simply these attacks are making money. Organisations are paying up, sometimes to the tune of seven figures.
Some have advocated turning repeat offenders over to HR for disciplinary proceedings.
Email, phishing and social engineering are the most popular vectors of attack. One of the drawbacks of remote working is that you can no longer lean over your desk to check with a colleague if something you've just received is legitimate. And with people generally tired, overworked, and sometimes with children buzzing around the house being home schooled - a far noisier activity than you'd expect - the lack of colleagues doesn't equate to a lack of distraction. That also leads to people clicking on, and responding to things they really shouldn't.
As ever, training is one of the best answers. Many firms we spoke to recommended a series of fake phishing emails to be sent to all staff to see who falls for it. People who click are sent through to a page warning them of the dangers, then invited to do some additional training.
Repeat offenders get more training. Interestingly, some have advocated handing serious repeat offenders over to HR for disciplinary proceedings. Security after all is a key part of everyone's job, it's not an IT thing. If you repeatedly fail at any part of your job, you can expect to start to have some difficult conversations. Organisations are often wary of doing this with security, but we feel it's one of the best ways of changing behaviour.
And awkward conversations with staff are generally preferable to awkward conversations with the board about the enormous sum you've just had ransomed out of you.
Many organisations are turning to AI and Machine Learning algorithms to help secure their organisations. Given that cyber criminals are starting to leverage the same technology to make their attacks more likely to land, this seems like a good idea - and the next step in the cyber arms race.
However, AI is one of the most mis-used phrases in IT, and in an industry which likes to overuse language like ‘digital transformation' and ‘quantum', that's saying something.
There is a huge amount of vendor hype around AI, usually applied to anything with an algorithm, or simple automation. True AI, at least in this context, uses machine learning to achieve its results.
And with systems and servers ever more inter-connected, many organisations are adopting the zero trust philosophy of ‘trust nothing, verify everything' to segment networks and prevent breaches spreading. Whilst an ongoing trend, this will certainly become more pervasive in 2021.
AI-enhanced security, its trends and a deep analysis of the available vendors, is available in Delta, the award-winning market intelligence service from Computing.
Many IT leaders feel more confident about their security when it's 'AI-enhanced'
Enterprise Open Source
No longer a back-room or purely academic pursuit, open source is now a serious enterprise option and can be seen everywhere from mobile phone operating systems to banking internals in the world's financial centres.
Programs that would once have been guarded jealously behind closed doors are now routinely open sourced, with the aim of attracting developers to cut their time to market
Not all open source is born equal, indeed some source code is more open than others, but being able to adopt and adapt other people's work and to share the results has undoubtedly fuelled technological innovation.
A significant proportion of cloud, big data and web technologies (including containers, Hadoop, streaming technologies and others) are open source, as are most of the newer databases. The range of applications for which is there is a viable open source option is growing all the time. Organisations don't necessarily select it because it's cheaper (though with many options following a ‘freemium' commercial model, they are at least easy to adopt); instead, it's chosen for its quality, the fact that users can contribute to its development to meet their own needs, because it fills gaps in coverage by proprietary solutions, and of course an active community means that patches, fixes and updates should be issued more promptly.
Programs that would once have been guarded jealously behind closed doors are now routinely open sourced, with the aim of attracting developers to cut their time to market (think Kubernetes, which started life at Google; Apache Kafka, which was an internal project at LinkedIn; and React from Facebook. Facebook alone open sourced 158 projects last year.
There are many underlying drivers for the ascendency of open source. One is the increased use of cloud, both as a way of working and as a distribution platform. Pre-GitHub, most projects were in-house efforts. Maybe that's still the case, but the easy availability of code on cloud repositories has certainly changed the game. It has also enabled players from countries like China to start playing a much bigger role. Anyone attending a software summit in the last couple of years could not have failed to notice the vastly larger presence of Chinese sponsors, media and developers.
Another trend is the bringing together of multiple open-source components to build platforms that span the various deployment models. Suse is a case in point, creating modular versions of its Linux distribution to run everywhere from the data centre to edge devices to public cloud, and overlaying that with other components including Open Stack to create a software-defined infrastructure layer.
Most open source projects fall into one of two camps. There are the collaborations between vendors, customers and academia to create software to solve big problems for big companies. These may make money for a couple of the vendors involved but even those firms don't own the project or have a controlling stake in its overall development. In the database world, Postgres would fall into this category.
In the other camp are projects that are largely controlled by one company which may own the core IP, one example being MongoDB.
Somewhere between these two sit companies built on projects that are maintained by a foundation. Confluent was set up by some of the original creators of Kafka, but Kafka is an Apache Software Foundation project. Databricks is similarly placed with Apache Spark.
Open source is becoming increasingly commonplace in the enterprise
Increased automation
With budgets squeezed ever tighter due to the continued impact of COVID-19 on every market, IT leaders will be asked to do even more with even less in 2021.Whilst Computing passionately believes that the IT department should be a strategic business partner and viewed as an engine for growth and innovation rather than a cost centre, tight budget controls are here to stay.
Often, processes that need to be re-engineered to be fit for the digital future are being kept on life support via the selective application of RPA
For many CIOs, the answer is often increased automation. One method which is rapidly growing in popularity is Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Its use cases range from automating simple, repetitive back office tasks using software 'robots', to more complex business process automation involving AI/ML.
The way we work, live, learn and socialise has changed to such a degree that returning to life as we knew it in 2019 now seems unthinkable. Organisations have had to adapt to survive, and as furlough schemes come to an end, many will have already decided how they are going to remain productive and adapt to such a huge shift in the pace of digitisation. A greater role for automation in back, middle and front of office seems a fairly safe bet for at least part of this transition, particularly if its available via a SaaS platform to keep capital costs down.
Many RPA vendors market their products and services as a crucial component of a wider process of digitisation. However, the reality that Computing's research established was that often, processes that need to be re-engineered to be fit for the digital future are being kept on life support via the selective application of RPA. It probably wasn't quite what vendors had in mind.
There is no one vendor perceived as a 'gold standard' and equally, none are marked out by users as being best avoided. The best-known vendors - Blue Prism, UIPath and Automation Anywhere - account for around four fifths of the market, and the remaining fifth is crowded. Given the lack of diversity in the market, not only is a high level of consolidation likely, but it is possible that RPA itself will eventually become crowded out by other Intelligent Automation technologies. At the moment RPA is perceived by many as being a short- to medium-term fix. The big challenge faced by vendors is to change that perception and find a way to market RPA for the long term.
Whilst vendors seek to push the market towards the higher (and more profitable) end of the scale with so-called 'intelligent automation', the market itself is still dipping its toes in the water, and simple, back-office processes will continue to form the majority of RPA needs in 2021, with some customer-facing processes going down the same route with early adopters.
Find out more about RPA including what hundreds of independently-sourced end users feel about their projects, and the vendors they used, in Delta, the award-winning market intelligence service from Computing. A monthly membership deal is available until the end of 2020.
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Stuart Sumner
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