Several organisations actually emerged stronger in 2021 in terms of business continuity, after having experienced the deep impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. The key reason for this dramatic shift can be easily attributed to adoption of digital transformation and technological innovations.
Many technological trends in 2022 focus on delivering efficiency and growth with rapid digitisation and automation. Adopting them and ensuring the trends are integrated in to the business operations will propel organisations to achieve their business goals in the coming year.
Greater focus on Hyper-automation
Yes, we are already familiar with how automation in businesses is increasing efficiency in operations with far fewer errors across the entire supply chain. It ensures effective use of data and provides consistency in products and services. Hyper-automation is the next step, which involves Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Process Mining, Advanced Analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), Intelligence Business Process Management and other advanced tools. Its adoption leads to dramatic increase in productivity, delivery of better business outcomes, wherein the workforce can be given higher order roles and be trained in them. Business agility increases to a great extent and there will be an acceleration in the complex tasks handled by the trained manpower. Digital workers will take over mundane, repetitive day-to-day work as end-to-end work-flows get automated.
Some industries that will leverage hyper-automation include, Banking and Financial Services, Government and Public Sector, Manufacturing, Life-sciences, among others.
AI and ML technologies gain further importance
In the year 2021, data scientists spent a significant amount of their time in tedious tasks of cleaning, integrating, processing and preparing data and training models. However, the time of these highly-skilled professionals are precious and should not be wasted on such operational issues. Year 2022 will see more of AI and ML tasks becoming automated enabling the data scientists to focus on configuring and perfecting algorithms.
Furthermore, Proof of Concept phase of AI of 2021 will be replaced by AI-first approach across organisations. AI-ML models will be leveraged for improving their business processes. AI use will become more strategic across all business units, as the technology becomes an integral part of the system providing real-time insights. Developers, Employees, Customer and Partners across companies of all sizes will have access to AI-ML models.
Extensive adoption of AI will be seen in Retail, Manufacturing, Healthcare, BFSI and other industrial verticals.
Managing Hybrid and Multi-cloud architecture crucial
There will be significant growth in the multi-cloud management market, driven by elimination of vendor lock-ins reducing the dependency on a single vendor. Customers can negotiate with other vendors for better pricing and SLAs, besides agility, elasticity and scalability. A growing demand for higher agility, automation and increase in the adoption of containerisation and microservices for cloud-native applications are also promoting the multi-cloud strategy for organisations.
In addition to adopting multi-cloud, businesses will focus on Hybrid-cloud architecture, which includes multiple cloud services from public as well as private cloud providers. This system offers the cost-optimisation and scalability of public cloud in addition to the control, security and compliance of the private cloud.
With Cloud-first strategy going mainstream, it becomes all the more important to effectively manage Hybrid and Multi-Cloud environments in 2022.
Cybersecurity Mesh will gain further traction
With Remote working culture and BYOD adoption, the earlier traditional security perimeter is invalid today, with every individual user becoming the new perimeter. Such an environment and network demand a Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture (CSMA). This supports organisations in the delivery of an integrated security structure and posture to ensure all IT and networking assets are secure irrespective of their location. With the surge in cyber-threats, organisations are getting more aware of the associated consequences and dangers of losing customers, businesses besides the damage of the brand image. They are now readily exploring cyber-security mesh architecture, which is dynamic and composable, connecting widely dispersed and variety of security services. The different security solutions in this environment will work together to ensure overall security.
This architecture addresses security lapses and scalability issues that cannot be solved with the limitations of traditional security solutions.
Cybersecurity Mesh will become the business safety net for organisations across industry verticals, going forward.
With increasing growth of fast-paced technological innovations and trends, it becomes all the more critical for businesses to embrace them for better streamlining of operations with higher speed and efficiency. Yes, it is imperative for organisations in these modern times, to take the road of digital transformation to enable enhanced customer experience, drive innovation at a faster pace and reduce the time to market.
