Making strategic decisions for your company’s near future is a task that the pandemic has further complicated. Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a CEO grappling with the digital transformation process and the need to speed up its adoption precisely to respond to the changes imposed by the prolonged state of emergency. Which technologies are most useful for investing with the imperative of finding more direct paths to connect with customers without losing sight of margins and cash flows?
Password “resilience”
Gartner experts tried to answer this question (even before the Omicron variant exploded), outlining a dozen trends considered to be real multipliers of innovation over the next three to five years and grouping them into three distinct clusters. The first is trust, to which the tools must be addressed to ensure a more resilient and efficient IT infrastructure for the company to manage data in cloud and non-cloud environments. The second is change, to be addressed through new technologies with which to scale and accelerate the automation of business activities and the digitization of the entire organization, decision-making processes included. The third is business growth, to be supported by maximizing the creation of value and the improvement of digital capabilities. Here, in no particular order, are some of the strategic technology trends for 2022. And why they are valuable.
Modular architectures
In technical jargon, the experts call it “data fabric” and in a nutshell it is an architecture for data with the peculiarities of being adaptable, flexible and secure. In many ways, it is a new strategic approach to enterprise-class storage operations, enabling you to make the most of cloud resources, core systems, edge and IoT devices. The advantage? Provide flexible and resilient integration of data sources across corporate platforms (and users), making information available wherever it is needed, regardless of where it lives and resides.
And where analytics technologies come into play, a “data fabric” can help IT managers use and modify data, saving up to 70% on management costs. The advantages of a modular architecture that integrates distributed and disparate services can also be grasped in terms of security. The application of «Cybersecurity Mesh» systems will be the tool that will allow stand-alone solutions to work together to improve the overall level of protection, speeding up the verification of key parameters such as identity, context and compliance.
Cloud-native platforms and composable applications
Building new application architectures – resilient, elastic and agile – to better respond to the rapid change enabled by digital transformation: is one of the “mantras” that IT managers are called to observe and cloud native platforms are the technological answer to this need. The ultimate goal is to overcome the limitations of the traditional “lift-and-shift” approach to the cloud, which allows you to move an application with its associated data from the on-premise data center to the cloud without having to redesign it from scratch. According to experts, another trend that will streamline the work of IT departments are modular applications built with modular “business centric” components, which make it easier to use and reuse code by accelerating the time to market of software solutions.