Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021 / A Look at Gartner’s Latest Tech Trends
Each year, tech offers powerful ways to boost business performance. Then COVID-19 came along, further increasing demand for specific services. Tech is now moving forward to a different focus of combining remote capabilities and technology like touchless interfaces to keep businesses open. 2021 is about advanced mobility, and the technology that processes this sits at the top of the list of business tech priorities.
Strategic technology is trending at an unrelenting pace for 2021, with new achievements in information technology consistently hitting the market. New devices also create new disciplines as the need for faster and better computing methods compete with the electron for speed. The demand is so high and the technology so advanced, it’s hard to recognize what the limits will look like for the future.
In this article, you will learn about the advancements today’s businesses can’t wait for in 2021 by referencing Gartner’s latest technology trends for 2021. You will also learn how the right technology management source can help you take advantage of their benefits.
Let’s see what we have in store for 2021.
What are the Latest Technology for 2021?
When googling “what are the technology trends for 2020 and 2021”, you will most likely find data from Gartner. The company is a global leader in vendor ratings, advice, tools, and other information for a wide range of business segments such as IT, HR, marketing, and sales. It has a strong reputation as an independent source, and each year puts out an annual report with the latest tech trends.
What are the emerging technologies for 2021? Though there are some repeats, it has broken results down into categories with new terms that also show their progress.
Gartner’s List of Top Strategic Technology for 2021
Though some love the Gartner list, some talk openly about its quirks. One of them is Steven Andriole, a man who knows a thing or two about tech.
Andriole is the Thomas G. Labrecque Professor of Business Technology in the Villanova School of Business at Villanova University. He has Masters and Doctorate degrees from the University of Maryland and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from La Salle University for his extensive achievements. In addition to designing and developing computer systems, including the Early Warning & Monitoring System, he has written over 500 articles and 30 books on information technology, defense systems, human-computer interaction, and much more. His disciplines include strategic technology, and he discusses advancements in new technology and various business models around the subject.
Evident in his Forbes article from October 2020 (link https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveandriole/2020/10/22/gartners-top-10-strategic-technology-trends-for-2021-the-easy-the-weird–the-forgotten/?sh=6b2b39f65574 ) Professor Andriole remarks about how the company often has the same categories each year, changes older names of categories when it doesn’t have to, and misses some categories altogether.
Those issues aside, Gartner still loves the list, and he isn’t the only one. Gartner’s work reputation in the business has made it an authority for understanding upcoming trends.
What Are the Latest Technology for 2021?
Here’s a summary of the top technology changes for 2021 by Gartner.
Top Strategic Technology Trend No. 1: Internet of Behaviors (IOB)
Gartner predicted in 2020 that the Internet of Behavior would grow fast and even lead to some growing pains. That trend is continuing. The company says that by 2023, 40% of the world’s population would be tracked using digital technology to guide our actions.
IoT (Internet of Things) refers to smart devices like Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, and individual electronics like stoves and coffee makers that connect you through technology like touchless interfaces to devices via your smartphone, tablet, or even your simple voice. These devices also track user data and share it across multiple smart devices. Though most of the tracking is to improve the tech operation, sometimes the data is used for marketing purposes.
IOB is essentially the next step – analyzing not just pieces of information but also our behaviors. It can recommend healthy meals and actions and present options, resulting in sellable solutions to customers. Behavior scientists and even advertisers want the IOB to be specific and individual to maximize its effectiveness. Since AI doesn’t know what a customer wants until it shows it, a good result leads to more options it can recommend that in the same vein.
Some of this can be seen as intrusive but also quite positive. Marketers can bring more defined messages to better communicate benefits to individual customers, and that can be a good thing. The technology is still in the early stages, so we’ll see how effective and ineffective it becomes moving forward.
The continued growth of IoT and IOB may be something you and your business are open to down the road.
Top Strategic Technology Trend No. 2: Cybersecurity Mesh
What is a Cybersecurity Mesh? This type of cybersecurity lets you access digital devices securely anywhere via your digital identity. In basic terms, the prior, more isolated ways of retaining security aren’t working within organizations due to the volume of outside digital sources available, so using identity parameters via the cloud is easier and more reliable. This technology will boom, covering over half of digital access requests by 2025, heavily fueled thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Top Strategic Technology Trend No.3: Total Experience (TX)
This is an example of a name change from Gartner.”Total experience” stems from “multiexperience”, the experience of voice, gestures, and touch. The new term defines how multiexperience is being expanded to customers, employees, and other users to accommodate for increased mobile and virtual interfaces since Covid 19. The main goal here is to improve its usage with businesses, helping them boost their performance virtually and better compete in the marketplace through the quality and sophistication of the experience.
Top Strategic Technology Trend No.4: Privacy-Enhancing Computation
The surge in global data means company CIOs have their work cut out for them to keep their data systems and interfaces safe, and one way to improve that security is to use privacy-enhancing computation. This allows for users access to sensitive data while protecting the data while in use and still maintaining a private environment anywhere the user is.
Due to its predicted growth, companies are encouraged to analyze how they process data that houses personal information and requires data monetization.
Top Strategic Technology Trend No.5: Distributed Cloud
This is a way of distributing public cloud offerings across multiple geographic locations while making the control and oversite the responsibility of the cloud provider. Being cloud-based means businesses of any size can better handle data speed, costs, and storage volumes where the employees are. This will prove to be the future of cloud services, providing greater flexibility and more potential for growth in cloud computing while creating less responsibility on businesses themselves.
Top Strategic Technology Trend No.6: Anywhere Operations
Just as it sounds, this strategy involves aiding users anywhere they are in their business needs. In addition to benefiting users who sit at home, it allows for an improved experience in the areas of collaboration, productivity, data access, and automated support while bringing cloud and edge advantages and a greater understanding of digital activities.
Top Strategic Technology Trend No.7: Intelligent Composable Business
Though static technology has been immensely powerful for businesses over the years, the lack of adaptability hasn’t helped during COVID-19. The new systems will be more sophisticated. The pandemic has been a great example of how environments can unpredictably change. Being “intelligent composable” means staying nimble while improving business performance.
Top Strategic Technology Trend No.8: AI Engineering
Gartner revealed that 53% of projects use AI toward its final goals, but currently it isn’t the easiest to scale. New strategies are being put in place to help in this, namely DataOps, ModelOps, and DevOps, making it easier to work with AI while improving its usability, function, and reliability.
The progress of AI has been remarkable, and the future looks huge. As discussed in The Digital Speaker Series: The Tech Journal – Episode 01. (link), https://datafloq.com/read/the-digital-speaker-series-the-tech-journal-episode-01/11802 , this is in part due to less reliance on standard electricity. Breakthroughs have shown how AI can now use photons to create computations at literally the speed of light, making processing times 100x faster than before.
Additionally, machine-based neural networks allow it to work like a human’s brain, but immensely faster and without human involvement. Your AI will be the smartest thing in the room, solving problems and solving complex theories faster than your mind ever could, and even automatically improve its performance with updates it creates along the way. Humans would never be able to match up.
Currently, AI still requires basic electricity to run, but recent achievements in Quantum computing will compete with the electron for power, allowing AI to further speed up AI performance by unlocking barriers to its speed. It will also aid directly in AI computations, boosting performance further.
Top Strategic Technology Trend No.9: Hyperautomation
Businesses that use hyperautomation look to recognize, secure, and automate internal processes more quickly. More businesses are doing this each year, but COVID-19 put hyperautomation into hyperdrive, showing that everything must be digital in today’s business world. Gartner predicts this course won’t reverse.
Gartner IT Roadmap for Cybersecurity: A Resilient Strategy
Gartner is showing that by 2023, 75% of organizations will change the way they analyze risk and govern security to keep up with the latest tech advances. This percentage is far beyond the 15% figure today, emphasizing the importance of keeping a strong cybersecurity policy. It should remain top of mind to guard against online threats and compromised data as the new technology defines the new norms in businesses. This is where companies like ours come in.
At Haber Group, we have the expertise and bandwidth to handle what today’s and tomorrow’s technologies offer. We can provide the needed systems and oversight to help your business take advantage of new ways of working since COVID-19.
We specialize in technology management, IT security, cloud IT, virtual CIO services, remote workforce services, data backup, and more, making us a go-to source for your security, data, and virtual needs. Whether your employees sit in an office, at home, or in a car, we can ensure your business takes advantage of safer and more powerful technology as it becomes available to boost your performance.
