Technology Trends to Watch in 2021
2020 was a doozy. Will 2021 become the second episode, or will we be able to move towards sustainable growth? The Fively team has identified and analyzed the latest technology trends to note.
Shaping the Digital Workplace
Remote work is the new normal of 2021 — half of the employees work from home now. This could not but affect fundamental approaches and workflows. Organizations are adopting solutions to enhance individual and team performance, productivity, and collaboration.
Let’s admit the fact that remote working has several restrictions, the most painful of which are poor relationship building, difficulties in self-development and learning, and the loss of accidental discoveries that happen during casual employees’ interactions. Nonetheless, 60% of professionals who had started working remotely claim that their work-life balance is better now.
At the same time, conventional offices aren’t dead yet. Employees can perceive offices as headquarters, places of face-to-face communication. In the post-COVID-19 world, brick-and-mortar offices are shifting from workplaces to hubs for employees’ socialization and meetings. It leads us to the fact that we’re entering the age of the hybrid workplace when employees can keep seamless workflows regardless of their location. The top technologies in 2021 will include multi-cloud services and environments as well as new-level cybersecurity solutions that we discuss in the following part.
The digital part will continue being enhanced by videoconferencing, calls, corporate social media, and chats. However, we’ll see more sophisticated solutions that are supplemented by augmented reality — simulated work environments and videogames where participants can catch up on the advantages of daily offline communications.
Zero Trust Security
Conventional cybersecurity architecture is characterized by a secure network perimeter, like a firewall. In the times of remote working and remote access from the outside of security perimeters, such systems become vulnerable to cybercriminals. While conventional models trust the users connected to the network remotely, misappropriated credentials are the reason for more than a quarter of security violation cases. The obvious growth of gadgets would only exacerbate the situation.
To avoid the collapse, the best technology companies had to change their approach from trust to zero trust. It means that all the devices and users trying to get access can not be trusted. The approach was offered by the principal analyst of Forrester Research and supported by the IT community.
One of the key zero-trust concepts is context-awareness. If the system detects an attempt to get access from an atypical location and in weird hours, it recognizes the risks and denies the request. With the help of APIs and some automated solutions, you’ll be able to set the needed layers of security control. Another important feature of zero-trust architecture is micro-segmentation. The access to the resources should be limited according to the principle of least privilege which prevents accidental data leakage by new and inexperienced employees. At the same time, effective and well-coordinated teamwork remains due to cloud connectivity.
Businesses are discovering more benefits of the new security approach. The global zero-trust security market is expected to grow to nearly USD 38 billion by 2025.
Growth of the Internet of Behaviours
If you’re tired of reading about the IoT as an important trend of the latest years, say hello to a new acronym — the IoB or the Internet of Behaviours. Its main idea is to collect, get together, and process data in order to attach it to specific human behavior patterns like shopping, choosing and following role models, or learning something. As you may see, the IoB is a logical extension of the IoT, complemented with the ideas of behavioral psychology.
By 2023, the individual activities of 40% of the world population will be tracked digitally in order to influence its behavior. The IoB gains are quite obvious — companies will be able to use the information on behavioral patterns for their own purposes — creating appropriate UX, optimizing search results, making suitable products, and marketing campaigns.
Nonetheless, the IoB extension opens Pandora’s box of losing privacy rights. What are the limitations of behavior tracking? What if the data falls into the wrong hands? It remains to be seen and looks like legislators will also be busy this year.
Need more tech trends and insights? Read the article ‘Web Development Trends to Watch in 2021’ and follow the blog of Fively, the most enquiring software development company.
