Microsoft presents technology trends for 2022

Digital transformation is key to business resilience and growth. Over the last 18 months, we have seen massive transformation at an unimaginable and at unprecedented speed. Organizations, including governments, enterprises, and small businesses, are modernizing and innovating using cloud services. The pandemic, in a way, has demonstrated that digitally fortified firms are more adaptable, resilient, and capable of transforming when confronted with a crisis.

Cloud is at the heart of accelerating digital transformation and innovation. Organizations, across the spectrum of industries are re-imagining their business models, growth engines and fast-tracking digitalization efforts to be more agile. Simulation, automation, and remote everything is becoming a reality with the move to a digital first world. Fundamentally, we’re moving from a mobile and cloud era to an era of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence, an era which will experience more digitization over the next 10 years than witnessed in the past four decades.

Below are a set of a few key technology trends that are transforming every company and will play a significant role in 2022:

• The first trend is that every business is becoming a digital business and building your own digital capability will be crucial. This requires that you have the best multi-cloud, multi-edge infrastructure. Computing is becoming distributed and embedded in the real world. Organizations will continue to expand boundaries beyond their DC, into multi cloud and evolve edge AI/analytics to gain greater speed and latency. Its imperative that they start to build out one window to their cloud, seamless and at the edge. And never has a management pane been so important. AI / Analytics at the edge will transform experiences.
  
• In the future, every organization will need a more distributed, more intelligent, more autonomous computing fabric- one that they can use to rapidly build, manage, and deploy applications anywhere. For this, they will need new tools that bring together both pro developers and domain experts. The final trend is the need to protect everything with end-to-end security.

Cybersecurity is the biggest threat to the industry. If we were to assess the change that our IT and cyber operations had to go through in the aftermath of the pandemic as every business process became remote, this complexity will only increase. Cybercrime is also costing economies more than $6 trillion each year, which is expected to increase to $10 trillion by 2025. Every organization needs comprehensive tools across identity, security, compliance, privacy, as well as management. In addition to that, they need a cross-platform multi-cloud zero-trust architecture.

• As privacy and data breaches become a key consideration in the way how people use Internet, Web 3.0 and blockchain will be the foundational technology that will drive this trend. The new set of open protocols and services that are being developed will be key in how Web3 eventually shapes up. The future will be driven by cloud technologies and the emergence of Web 3.0, Crypto, Blockchain which are driving new avenues of growth.
  
• A recent report by Gartner estimates that, by 2024, 65% of application development by organizations would occur on low code/no code platforms. In the next 2-3 years, 75% of large businesses will be employing at least four low-code development tools for IT application development. Today, as organizations increasingly turn to low-code platforms to accelerate app development and save time and cost.

In providing that flexibility to their employees in the manner of what they're working, we are seeing the rise of citizen developers. That's a big trend where I think again cloud will play a very central role. When compared to the traditional software development method, low-code platforms offer more deployment by deploying pre-built templates and automated software workflows which offer a simple way to build diverse applications.

• Convergence of HPC and AI: The convergence of HPC (High performance computing) and AI is a revolution, bringing dramatic acceleration to every kind of simulation, and advancing fields across science and industry. This will enable researchers; health tech industry to make new discoveries faster and advance state-of-the-art science. Customers are increasingly finding the best way to access such high-performance computing (HPC) is through the agility, scale, security, and AI cloud services.
  
• Mixed reality (AR/VR): As remote working becomes the norm, an online virtual world which incorporates augmented reality, virtual reality, 3D holographic avatars, video and other means of communication will help employees to communicate personally in the virtual world. We're bringing people, places, and things together with the digital world in both the consumer space, as well as in the enterprise. What's most important is that we can bring our humanity with us and choose how we want to experience this world and who we want to interact with.

Digital transformation is set to build not only long-term resilience, increase speed to market, workforce productivity, and stability but this will also add exposure, viability and make the company’s more future-ready. Cloud adoption will continue to grow and evolve in years to come. We are standing at a crucial stage of the cloud computing revolution with some of these trends that are going to be the building blocks for a bright future.

-- Shivir Chordia, Azure Business Group Lead, Microsoft India.