* By Chris Wolf
We all entered 2020 with a plan. A few months later, they became irrelevant. Organizations quickly implemented contingency strategies and suspended non-essential initiatives. This may lead us to believe that this year was a bucket of cold water for technological innovation, but I would argue otherwise. In fact, organizations have implemented inspired solutions to address important challenges.
Here are some observations from 2020 and five corporate technology predictions for 2021.
- Edge is the new frontier for innovation
Incredible things are happening at the edge. We saw this prominently in 2020. Here are some examples:
- When the pandemic first hit us, a laboratory testing company deployed 400 mobile testing stations in the United States in a matter of weeks;
- A retailer relocated its entire primary distribution center, which was in a state that enacted social isolation, to serve an e-commerce order flow from a new location.
These organizations used existing edge investments to react and innovate quickly. And next year, we will continue to see investments in the edge as a priority.
Network reliability and performance directly affect the employee and customer experience. This alone led to expansive implementations of SD-WAN on the edge and in home offices. Simple solutions provided by SaaS (including hardware) will further improve security and the user experience, wherever employees choose to work. This will start a trend in which these technologies will become normal.
In addition, the expectation is that organizations will increasingly adopt secure access service edge (SASE) solutions. The legacy network and security architectures create unnecessary constraints and degrade performance. Therefore, our future will lie in applications and infrastructure services that are defined by software and deployed and managed as software updates. By changing legacy procurement processes along the way, companies will dramatically improve performance and security.
We are also getting much smarter at the edge, with the ability to learn, react and optimize in real time. In addition, we are seeing new opportunities for infrastructure consolidation at the edge, reducing the number of specialized devices needed to meet technology demands. This is a development that opens doors to more cost-effective solutions, with which you improve automation, security and efficiency, while reducing costs.
- Decentralization of machine learning
Still on the edge, let's talk about federated machine learning (FML). We are beginning to see an early acceptance of this area among companies. Across all sectors, organizations are innovating to make better data-based decisions, while leveraging highly distributed technologies.
With computational capabilities virtually everywhere, federated machine learning allows organizations to train machine learning (ML) models using local data sets. Open source projects, like FATE and Kubeflow, are gaining momentum. And I expect the emergence of intuitive applications on these platforms to further accelerate adoption.
Early ML solutions disproportionately benefited a small percentage of companies that already had mature data science practices in place. ML adoption continues to accelerate, driven by ready-to-use solutions designed for “everyone else”. These are organizations that want to reap the rewards of ML without having to make huge investments in data science teams - usually a difficult challenge due to the shortage of these professionals in the industry today.
- The renewal of Workspace 2.0 initiatives
The pandemic has brought a renewal to many Workspace 2.0 initiatives. I am especially interested in use cases for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). These technologies are gaining momentum, especially in employee training, AR-assisted navigation (as on corporate campuses) and in online meetings. This year, I had the opportunity to participate in a virtual reality meeting. The cognitive experience was quite fascinating. During a Zoom meeting, it's pretty obvious that you're on a video call, but after a few minutes in a VR meeting, you start to feel like you're all in the same room together.
There is still work to be done to boost mass adoption. The year 2021 will see gains in the adoption of AR and VR, aided by advances in cutting-edge technologies that address security, user experience and device management of these solutions.
That said, the biggest gap in virtual reality, in my opinion, is that there is no equivalent to Microsoft PowerPoint for VR. In other words, in the future, I want to be able to quickly create 3D content that can be consumed in virtual reality. Today, there is simply no easy productivity tool that allows anyone to quickly create rich 3D content that takes full advantage of the 360º panorama offered by VR. I hope this will be an area of focus for AR and VR experts in the future.
- Continuous evolution of intrinsic security and data protection
Security innovations have turned intrinsic security from what some call the “buzzword in marketing” into something real. Today it is possible to take advantage of virtualization technologies to protect a workload the moment it is powered on, even before an operating system is installed. This is intrinsic security by definition and represents a major step forward from the traditional security model.
In 2021, security will once again be among the top technology investments of the year, with ransomware and edge security getting more attention. Sophisticated ransomware attacks target not just data, but also backups of data and systems, creating the possibility that even system restores will be compromised.
We need to change the way we protect systems and data. We need to fundamentally rethink what it means to back up and recover systems. Legacy solutions with static protection and recovery approaches will begin to face the potential for disruption as the year progresses.
When we look at the edge, an increasing number of technology decisions are being made by lines of business - sometimes even at the local level - and not by central IT. This has long posed challenges, as smart, connected devices are deployed on edge sites more quickly than traditional IT processes. While we must always strive to deploy compatible solutions, we must accept the fact that the requirements for speed and agility in business can be in conflict.
Therefore, we must look at technologies that offer a broader discovery of systems connected at the edge and provide application of adaptive security policies for those systems. Rather than fighting for control, security leaders must accept that there is some degree of chaos and innovate with their expectations in opposition to total control.
- Applying new technologies to old challenges
In 2021, what's old may be new again - at least if we look at how new technologies can help solve old challenges.
For example, in the area of sustainable computing, there is a lot of energy efficiency to be achieved in the traditional data center, such as projects to optimize the hot and cold aisles of data centers. Studies reveal that a promising amount of energy efficiency can be achieved through the heat management of the platform-based data center. In addition, machine learning may soon help improve accessibility.
2020 was a year of determined progress. Unforeseen challenges taught us to plan and architect for the expectation of change. We need to be resilient to adapt to new ways of living and working. On the other hand, 2021 brings hope as we sail to our new normal - whatever it may be. And I'm excited to see how it will be shaped by advances in technology.
* By Chris Wolf, Vice President, Advanced Technology Group, VMware CTO Office
Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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