*By Ruben Delgado
The new year has arrived bringing a scenario built over almost 24 months of a pandemic that profoundly altered social and economic relationships, challenging our ability to adapt.
Technology, which has already been shaping the evolution of our society, has taken on an even more active role, with the mass migration of the workforce to the home office around the world. Video calls replacing face-to-face meetings are just one of the visible tips of an iceberg of radical transformations on the way.
For 2022, it is possible to identify some trends that will guide the IT sector and, one of them, is an even greater demand for solutions in cloud computing, which brings together the best of both worlds by significantly reducing costs related to IT infrastructure and delivering a scalability capable of keeping up with increasingly frequent boom and bust cycles.
Another trend that should experience significant expansion in the new year is the use of Artificial Intelligence, which is increasingly present in our daily lives. A good example in this regard is AI.2 MCTI, technological acceleration program in Artificial Intelligence, an initiative of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovations with execution by Softex. It aroused the interest of more than 700 proposals for applications from startups, focusing on four priority areas: industry, health, agro and smart cities.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is another area that will certainly be marked by strong expansion, going far beyond the conveniences of a smart home where a light can be turned off or on with a simple voice command. Its business use will be increasingly present in the most diverse areas, revolutionizing traditional models such as agribusiness, and the arrival of 5G will add even more fuel to this movement.
Cybersecurity will also expand significantly in 2022. With more and more sensitive data being stored, there is even greater interest from criminal actors to sophisticate their activities in search of easy profit. Due to the growing number of successful attacks on companies of all sizes and industries, even insurance companies are demanding greater guarantees from their customers in order to offer a protection policy.
The planning and implementation of a robust security policy will be a priority for corporations, which are already aware of the magnitude of the devastating financial and image losses that these criminal actions are capable of generating.
Another direct consequence of the continuous explosion of data is the need to manage this huge mass of information, seeking to maximize its use in a countless number of activities, such as aiding decision-making. The correct treatment of this universe of data in a growing process of expansion generates significant impacts on the innovation process of companies, optimizing costs and adding efficiency to performance.
We cannot forget about the metaverse, collective and shared space, resulting from the sum of virtual reality, augmented reality and the internet, which has come to revolutionize the way we relate and do business.
It is important to carefully read the impacts of all these trends on our society. Each of them will shape the future of the job market, removing people from tedious and unproductive tasks, starting to demand professionals aligned with the needs of dynamic scenarios that until then did not exist, even generating many new opportunities and careers.
*Ruben Delgado, president of the Association for the Promotion of Excellence in Brazilian Software (Softex)
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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