The Covid-19 pandemic overturned IT trends and forecasts for the past year – most companies were probably busy enabling their employees to work from home on the spur of the moment; The digital transformation, cloud applications, and data security / cyber-attacks were therefore inevitably top priorities in IT and will undoubtedly remain so in the coming year. These will be the focus topics in 2021.
BaaS Is The New Normal In Cloud Strategies
Even if the pandemic subsides, many workers will continue to have to work from home. A more distributed data density accompanies this in the company’s infrastructure. Applications are to be relocated to the public cloud, but the amount of data in the existing on-site infrastructure complicates and hinders initiatives for digital transformation. We expect business investment in technology and services to increase in 2021 to meet the data density challenge. The growth of new 10G wired and 5G wireless technologies that companies can use to ensure that the connection between their edge data and clouds is responsive, reliable, and secure is spurring.
Realignment Of Cloud Strategies
Due to the automatic switch to cloud technologies, partly forced by COVID19, many companies record high and entirely unexpected costs for hosting the applications. In recent years, we have seen a boomerang effect at these increased costs. Companies quickly relocated their applications and workloads back to the local infrastructure after their immediate need for cloud applications was met. Flexibility, scalability, transparency, and many other advantages of the cloud are challenging to realize if companies do not already have a long-term cloud-centric strategy in place.
Deepfake Technologies Increase The Need For Data Integrity Testing And Verification
Deceptively realistic images and videos faked by AI technologies pose considerable risks for companies. These technologies make it more difficult than ever to ensure that photos, videos, and other data streams have not been covertly manipulated via AI. For companies that make critical decisions based on this data, the risk of wrong decisions increases. To reduce this risk, in 2021, companies should create data integrity and verification solutions that will enable them to detect data that has been deepfaked.
Security In The Cloud
Cybercriminals have quickly developed ransomware methods to blackmail companies that have switched to cloud applications unprepared. Therefore, we can expect that some companies will suffer ransomware attacks, data blackouts, or heavy fines for lax compliance with data protection in the coming months. This is not because the cloud is inherently insecure or challenging to manage. But the priorities in 2021 will increasingly be on security, data analysis, and back and recovery.
Also Read – Cloud Technologies: Closing The Gap In Cybersecurity Skills
Dark Data Is Actively Used
For years, companies have been hoarding vast amounts of dark data: data that has to be archived for retention or compliance purposes and is otherwise unused. As companies need to differentiate themselves from their competition further, more and more companies will look to shed light on this dark data in 2021 to gain insights that can improve business results. This ranges from how they can lower their operating costs by optimizing the storage of this data to developing effective digital services for customers that give them a competitive advantage.
2021 Will Be The Year Of SaaS Applications
Digital services are increasingly seen as essential to the success of a company. The management of the IT infrastructure and applications is outsourced to external service providers if it is not part of the company’s core competence or optimization. A SaaS solution for human resources, corporate resource planning, or other business applications will be in place in most companies – regardless of whether they are a global financial company, medium-sized company, or small business. SaaS solutions and data management that meet everyday business needs and allow customers to focus on the digital services central to their business will grow rapidly.
Native Cloud Applications Are Driving The Growth Of The Container Market
Container applications offer a high degree of agility. In particular, the fact that containers can be used to make applications cloud-native will drive the growth of the container market. Using containers, companies can improve the scalability and performance of these applications in the cloud and more quickly move these applications between clouds – accelerating their digital transformation.
In addition to all the technology trends and priorities, one thing is sure: “Working from home – virtual work” will also be with us in the new year and will probably become the new rule. This makes it critical to provide the right tools and network capacities while maintaining quality and security. That is demanding enough since it is also essential to ensure the compatibility of internal and external communication. Unfortunately, at the moment, the human factor is very often lost. How do we ensure today that we can also virtually pick up conversation partners or encourage teamwork when an office is no longer a place for people to meet and collaborate.
More collective intelligence, authenticity, and team spirit can help us here than any suitable technology. Virtual meetings also have their pitfalls: A recently presented Microsoft study shows apparent weaknesses in video meetings: a lack of personal closeness, body language, and facial expressions that are difficult to read, as well as reduced visual and acoustic signals. To compensate for all of this, employees have to be even more concentrated than is the case in face-to-face meetings and tire more quickly. The study also underlines this: symptoms of fatigue set in after 30 to 40 minutes, the stress level remains significantly higher for about two hours – another argument in favor of using high-quality technology.
Also Read : Data Security With Backups And Replication
