It’s an understatement to say that 2020 was a year of evolution for all sectors, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The mass majority of tech leaders had to pivot their strategies by shifting to a largely remote-work model and assessing new markets that were impacted by unforeseen economic impacts.
Many experts are predicting new or evolved trends in 2021 due to all this change. Below multiple tech experts highlight their top predictions within the technology industry for the new year.
Abhijit Ghosh, co-founder and CEO, Confluera:
“Modern attacks focus on finding the weakest link in your security ecosystem and gaining an initial foothold in an enterprise network. Once in the network, bad actors move laterally, patiently focused on achieving their mission. Thus, today’s cybersecurity landscape can no longer rely on just keeping the bad people out; it also requires the ability to detect and track every step an attacker has taken to search and traverse the network in pursuit of their goal.
In 2021, we will see more organizations continue to increase reliance on cloud computing, and thus need to employ new cybersecurity paradigms to better protect themselves in that environment. Because of this, in the new year it is anticipated that organizations will rely on technologies such as XDR, which eliminate guesswork and instead deterministically combine individual findings with causal sequencing of all events across the infrastructure to understand the precise attack progression in real-time.”
Patrick Harr, CEO, SlashNext:
“Over the last 30 days, 10% of company users were phished, according to live data we compiled across more than 100 large and mid-sized enterprises. Every day, SlashNext Threat Labs detect 21,000 new phishing attacks, almost double the number of threats from a year ago, and SlashNext Threat Labs are seeing an alarming 50-75% attacks getting past conventional phishing defenses to compromise enterprise networks. So, if you think your current defenses will keep you safe, think again. And in 2021, we anticipate this problem will get much, much worse.”
Krishna Subramanian, president and COO at Komprise:
“In 2021, cloud replication will replace data center replication. The cloud is no longer just an inexpensive storage option for enterprise data. Enterprise IT organizations are realizing the importance of resiliency – to spin up access in the cloud if their datacenters become unavailable or to protect from cyberattacks with an air-gapped copy in the cloud. In 2021, many companies will stop mirroring their data across datacenters and instead put a second copy of their data in the cloud. This cloud replication ensures that data is recoverable if a site goes down, a company gets hit with ransomware, or if users need to spin up some capacity in the cloud and want to access some of the data there.”
Anshu Sharma, CEO and co-founder, Skyflow:
“Every large company is on a long-term transition to digital and cloud – so they can effectively compete against the likes of Amazon, and the Silicon Valley startups who are aiming for them. Companies like Nike, JP Morgan Chase, and Walgreens have been trying to transform and in 2020 they all got an unintended boost in their push to the cloud – because they had to. The Fortune 500, having seen relative success with cloud and digital are not going back. They are all doubling down. 2021 will be the year of the digital double down.”
Andrew Brust, analyst, Gigaom:
“Kubernetes – and container technology more broadly – will continue to make analytics technology and data portable across public cloud and between those clouds and customer data centers. That, in turn, will make analytics control plane technology, which can perform ‘fleet management’ across analytics deployments, more critical and valuable.”
Judd Bagley, Vice President of Marketing, Everise:
“Among the many impacts of the pandemic on economic life has been the need for brands and customers to figure out how to better interface with one another from a distance. In the short term this usually meant greater reliance on phone and chat-based interactions, however in 2020, the world quickly learned that these services – typically delivered via tightly packed contact centers– were themselves untenable. We expect B2C enterprises maintaining strong CX connections into 2021 will be those that understand the following six points and either incorporate them into their CX strategy or partner with outsourcers.”
Saad Siddiqui, principal, Telstra Ventures:
“The unrelenting pace of open source innovation will continue in 2021, particularly in the areas of data analytics and data infrastructure, leaving many Fortune 1000 businesses and other SMBs struggling to keep pace with, and integrate with, open source innovations. Unlike large tech players, who can afford to hire an army of engineers to constantly change things and add their own herbs and spices to improve their operations, most businesses and newer vendors don’t have as many talented engineers or can’t hire more engineers to keep pace with change. To address this talent wall, we’re seeing the rise of a hybrid open source business model, whereby open source data analytics companies like Incorta and infrastructure companies like Rancher Labs monetize closed source, out-of-the-box capabilities that deliver open source innovations while requiring less time and resources for enterprises to derive value.”
Cornelia Davis, CTO, Weaveworks:
“2021 will see the emergence of common distributed operational patterns widely implemented across all industries, and with the coming of 5G and the edge, this could not be timelier. There are several signals that foreshadow this, such as the adoption of GitOps as a defacto standard and best practice for operating Kubernetes and its workloads. IT systems will not only enjoy greater resilience, and security, but having GitOps in place also lays the foundation for massive scalability and growth.”
