Technology trends in 2024 through CTO’s lens

With technology changing and evolving at a dizzying pace, businesses need to know which technology will drive efficiency and power transformation. Synechron has identified the top five technology business trends for 2024.

AI and generative AI solutions will proliferate across sectors
Advanced AI will continue to offer businesses new ways to innovate and grow. ’Graph databases’, which store complex data structures and ‘vector databases’ which store, manage and index massive quantities of high-dimensional vector data efficiently, are garnering significant interest for their potential to create additional value for GenAI use cases and applications.

The biggest benefits for businesses will likely come from mass adoption of simple tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot-like assistants that work alongside popular Microsoft 365 apps to provide real-time intelligent assistance, enabling users to enhance their creativity, productivity and skills.

According to a KPMG report,66 per cent of Indian company CEOs and 70 per cent of global firms CEOs are considering generative AI as their top investment priority. A significant chunk of the increased IT spending is set to come from software and IT services impacted by investments in AI and Generative AI. As organizations aim to enhance their AI use cases, upskilling and hiring relevant talent becomes a top priority.

According to LinkedIn’s Future of Work: State of Work @ AI report, India is among the top five countries with the fastest-growing AI talent. It is, therefore, not surprising to see India rising as a global talent hub for enterprises’ ER&D operations, worldwide.

Businesses will be modernizing applications to bridge the business objectives with tech transformation.
Organizations globally face challenges with their legacy systems that can impede their ability to be agile and innovative. By embracing application modernization practices, like low-code/no-code development, cloud native/hybrid cloud technology, hyper-pesonalisation, containerization, AI chatbots etc organizations position themselves to thrive in the digital era and gain a competitive edge.

According to NASSCOM’s 2023 IT modernization survey, 61% of enterprises intent to re-architect/rebuild legacy applications with 88% of users having up to 60% of their tech budget dedicated to IT modernization.

However, application modernization cannot be delivered by executing it only as a technical initiative, for instance, rehosting (“lift-and-shift”) an application to the cloud. It's vital to have a thorough understanding of the underlying business drivers pushing for modernization. These drivers include improving agility, stability, scalability, providing new user experiences, enhancing security, and cost reduction.

Platform engineering to break siloes between software developers and operators
Platform engineering is one of the most talked-about topics in the DevOps community due to the development of a new generation of tools. It is an emerging trend to help improve the developer experience.

Gartner predicts that “By 2026, 80% of large software engineering organizations will establish platform engineering teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery. Platform engineering will ultimately solve the central problem of cooperation between software developers and operators. A platform’s ability to extend itself without impairing current system functions is vital.

Using data intelligently for AI disruption
A key ambition for many firms is to unlock data from existing silos and enable firm-wide breadth of insights through analytics. A trending approach for this is ‘Data fabric’ – an architectural concept to facilitate the end-to-end integration of various data pipelines and cloud environments using intelligent automation.

Through the process of combining and enhancing the underlying data semantics and implementing ongoing analytics on metadata, data fabric produces alerts and suggestions that can be handled by both people and machines.

Allied to this, there is the generation of analytic ‘data products’ which are optimized for quality, consumption and integration, and made available to internal data analysts. This requires as much focus on organizational and governance functions as it does on technical enablement. The creation of internal data marketplaces requires the automation of key ‘data operations’ activities – so we will see a drive towards knowledge graphs, data observability, data contracts and active metadata as enablers for this.

For businesses looking to exploit AI effectively, clean, quality data will be required to improve efficiency and quality insight.

Automating cyber security routines for increasing efficiency
In its "India Digital Payments Report for H1 2023," Worldline, a global payments service firm, disclosed a substantial surge in UPI transactions, soaring from 151 million in January 2018 to a remarkable 9.3 billion in June 2023. With this global shift towards digital platforms, the cyberthreat landscape is evolving rapidly as well.

In fact, according to data shared by the Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar in Lok Sabha, over 4.29 lakh cyber security incidents pertaining to financial institutions occurred in the first half of 2023.

Furthermore, the rise of automation takes on added significance as adversaries exploit AI in their attacks. Manual intervention alone proves insufficient, prompting CTOs to pivot towards AI-powered solutions. Embracing cybersecurity automation can empower organizations to proactively manage and neutralize cyber threats, preventing disruptions to critical operations.

With this, organizations can not only alleviate the burden on human resources but also respond rapidly and effectively to evolving threats, ensuring the resilience of digital infrastructures. This approach enhances incident response times, enabling organizations to swiftly address and mitigate the impact of security incidents.

In terms of cost-effectiveness, IBM's 2023 report underlines that corporations investing in AI and cybersecurity automation have realized significant savings, with an average of $1.76 million in the current year, amidst the average cost of a corporate data breach being $4.45 million.

Conclusion
These key areas, among others, will shape how businesses interact with technology in 2024. As always, it’s important that firms take the best advice and consider which technology solutions will best serve the needs of their customers, while helping them to grow their business, achieve efficiencies and look confidently into the future.

-- David Sewell, CTO, Synechron.