We tried looking around for what’s hot and happening in the field of IT and on what technologies do various consultants and business houses place their bets on. What fields received increased funding for this year’s research activities and much more. Read on to know further about the IT trends of this year.

Gartner has done the market survey and has classified the emerging technology trends into three buckets, viz., People centric technologies, Location independent technologies, and Resilient delivery technology

People centric technology: 

Engineering is the application of technology to simplify and ease the lives of people. Hence, the fundamental motto of most engineering companies is to develop applications and products that people cannot imagine living without, once they are introduced to them. One such people centric technology is the Internet of Behaviours(IoB).

Internet of Behaviours

Gartner predicts that IoB would be on the top of trends in 2021. IoB is the extension of IoT(Internet of things). While things collected and exchanged data with the IoT technology, IoB utilizes that data to draw some conclusions.
For example, if a person has a smartphone, and a wearable fitness tracker like a smartwatch, data about the person’s routine concerning how often does the person order food, what kind of food, how often does the person exercise, and for what duration, sleep quality are collected. 

These data are then organized to create a complete health status model of the person. This information opens the gates for a plethora of personalized content like advertisements, insurance suggestions, health tips, etc.

This technology could also find apt use cases in applications like ensuring safe driving, maintaining social distance in crowded places, financial applications that regulate spending, and encourage savings and investments to name a few. And this is why Internet of Behavior makes it to our list of emerging IT trends of 2021.

Additional to the growth in IoB technology,  there shall also be an emphasis on the total experience and security of private data of people in 2021.

Total experience (TX)

TX is going to be the new buzzword in 2021. TX is basically an approach that combines employee experience, customer experience, and user experience to ensure the holistic growth of the organization.

Implementing effective communication tools that can handle multichannel communications is one way of achieving a good TX. When employees and users know that they are treated with importance, they stay.

Data Security during computations

With the advent of digital transformation in sectors like healthcare and finance, sensitive private data of people is now on the internet. To prevent it from falling into wrong hands and be misused, data security is of paramount importance. One vulnerable point for data theft is during computations on private data. Though the private data is encrypted during storage, the computations are done on fairly unprotected data. 

Hence, there is a need for computation and data processing techniques that protect and enhance the privacy of user data during operations, and this is going to be among the top IT trends of 2021.

Technologies to ensure location independence:

2020 was a game changer for the way organizations ran the daily operations. It made most organizations realize that it was possible to accomplish work targets even without all the employees necessarily gathering at the office for fixed hours. This discovery has led the organizations to invest more in technologies that open the door for location independent working structure.

One such technology is distributed cloud that is expected to gain some traction in 2021.

Distributed cloud

Distributed cloud is a public cloud computing service. Here, the services are not necessarily run on the service provider’s native infrastructure. Instead, it can be run on several infrastructures that are in different geographic locations. This technology will significantly reduce the risk of network failures.

Successful implementation of distributed cloud architecture would also pave the way for other operation models like anywhere operations. And with the decentralization of operations, the security of data and communication becomes crucial. For this, a cybersecurity mesh can be of great use and is hence predicted to be a top trend of 2021.

Cybersecurity Mesh

Cybersecurity mesh is a robust and modular approach to the subject of IT security. The term ‘mesh’ refers to the idea that cybersecurity does not apply to only the devices of an IT network rather to all the access points in the network. The security at access points can however be controlled by a centralized control point. This strengthens the weak links of the IT infrastructure network. 

Technologies for resilient delivery:

Organizations should always strive towards gaining complete customer satisfaction. Come rain or shine, the delivery game should go on. In this regard, companies focus more on having technologies that can help them stomach more risks and sustainably deliver outputs by evening out the disruptions in regular work structures. One such idea for flexible business operations is an intelligent composable business

Intelligent composable business

A business that adapts to changing market conditions in real-time and takes quick data-driven decisions is the need of the hour, as the covid related market fluctuations taught us. To realize this, inside info and data of the business should be easily accessible to be augmented and to draw insights. Modularity is at the heart of the intelligent composable business and it is a breath of fresh air from unnecessary bureaucracy and bloated processes.
Speaking of processes, there are several process overheads at businesses that add very little value to the business but cannot be done away with. To address such processes, hyper automation is the best solution.

Hyper automation

Hyper automation is a concept that is likely to be adopted by organizations to dampen the factors affecting deliveries. The definition of hyper automation is simply that any repetitive task has to be automated. To realize this, one has to seek help from many tools and technologies like artificial intelligence(AI), Machine learning(ML), and Robotic Process Automation(RPA). Hyper Automation is the answer to how to ease effort consuming complex and repetitive work and it opens a gateway for digital transformation which is another thing most organizations are working on.

Intelligent composable business, hyper automation along with AI engineering constitute the IT trends for agility in organizations in 2021.

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