2021 Outlook: Top 5 Enterprise Technology Trends Forecast

 　　In the past year, the economic globalization process was forced to slow down and even regress under the impact of the new crown epidemic. But surprisingly, the entire world's digitalization process seems to have hit the fast-forward button. Many IT deployments that used to take years to complete landed in just a few months or even weeks. A variety of unforeseen real-world challenges are forcing companies to plan and design ahead, constantly improving their agility to keep pace with the new normal.

　　What we can expect in 2021 is that enterprises will accelerate the pace of digital transformation, which is highlighted by the further transformation of enterprise IT to cloud-native, the edge becoming the frontier of innovation, the further lowering of the threshold for machine learning, and the deeper penetration of native security. All of these innovative technologies will inject a new wave of energy into the digital transformation of Chinese enterprises.

　　Trend 1: Enterprise IT will accelerate cloud-native transformation

　　In 2021, enterprise digital transformation needs to move from point-like digital business innovation to systematic and scaled business digital transformation as soon as possible. The cloud-native enterprise IT architecture is the cornerstone of the transformation from point-like innovation to scale. Most enterprises will internally drive the adoption of cloud-native application and infrastructure frameworks with Kubernetes at their core. Cloud-native technologies are also being enthusiastically pursued by the technology community, with cloud vendors, integrators, application developers, and IT staff within users working to master Kubernetes technology.

　　However, not many enterprises have successfully adopted cloud-native architectures at scale. There are three major hurdles that customers need to overcome as soon as 2021 as they attempt to deploy cloud-native architectures on a large scale.

　　Taking fragmented tools and integrating them into systems that are usable by business users.

　　Facilitating the transformation of user IT organizations to cloud-native and integrating cloud-native methodologies and best practices into customers' existing processes and technology systems.

　　Accelerate the successful transition of independent software developers (ISVs) and in-house software development teams to cloud-native software architectures.

　　The cloud-native transformation of enterprise IT will be one of the major efforts for at least the next three to five years.

　　Trend 2: The edge becomes the frontier of innovation

　　In 2020, the amazing role of the edge is on full display, and life examples abound, as 5G construction is fully rolled out and on the ground. By leveraging existing edge investments, enterprise organizations are able to react and innovate as quickly as possible. 2021 will see the edge continue to be a top choice for investment as a windfall.

　　On the other hand, network performance and reliability directly impact the employee and customer experience, and this alone is driving the widespread adoption of SD-WAN in the edge and telecommuting space. Simplifying SaaS delivery solutions, including hardware, will further enhance security and user experience, regardless of where employees choose to work, while also becoming the new normal going forward.

　　Enterprises will widely adopt Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solutions in the future. Traditional network and security architectures create unnecessary information transfers and degrade performance. In the future, applications and infrastructure that are defined by software and deployed and managed with software updates will become mainstream. With changes to legacy procurement processes, enterprise organizations can dramatically improve their business performance and security.

　　The edge will also become significantly more intelligent with real-time learning, reaction and optimization capabilities. In addition, the edge presents new opportunities for infrastructure consolidation, not only to reduce the number of dedicated devices, but also to improve automation, security and efficiency with cost-effective solutions, while reducing costs.

　　Trend 3: Decentralization of machine learning

　　In addition to the edge, to solve the dilemma of data silos and data privacy, the federated machine learning framework (federated machine learning), which has been mentioned repeatedly in recent years, will become another "major player". This framework can help multiple organizations use data and model machine learning while meeting user privacy, data security and government regulations. Some organizations are already adopting federal machine learning technologies to better leverage data-driven decisions.

　　The ubiquity of computing power supports enterprise organizations to train machine learning models using local datasets through federated learning, and open source projects such as FATE and Kubeflow are receiving increasing attention. In the future, more applications based on the above open source platforms will emerge. Early machine learning solutions benefited only a small percentage of enterprises, and only those with strong data science capabilities were able to taste the sweetness of the situation, which was extremely unbalanced. The popularity of machine learning is now accelerating, and turnkey solutions are emerging that lower the barrier to machine learning and are available to a wider public. With the current shortage of data scientists, companies can benefit from machine learning as well, even if they do not have strong data science capabilities and cannot afford to invest accordingly.

　　Trend 4: The continued evolution of native security and data protection

　　Innovation has taken "native security" from marketing speak to reality.

　　According to the definition of native security, one can now secure workloads at the moment they are powered on, even before the operating system is installed, through virtualization technology. This is a major step forward from the traditional security model. 2021 will once again see security become one of the key technology investments as ransomware and edge security gain more and more traction. Sophisticated and complex ransomware attacks not only target data, but also include data and system backups, and may well even affect system recovery. There is an urgent need for change in the way we protect systems and data, and a fundamental rethinking of what it means to back up and recover systems. Over time, traditional solutions with static protection and recovery approaches will face the potential for disruption.

　　As we revisit the application scenarios at the edge, it becomes clear that more and more technology decisions are being made by the line of business rather than by central IT, sometimes even at the local level. This is a problem that has long been difficult to address as smart and connected devices are being deployed in edge locations faster than traditional IT processes. While we should aim to deploy compliant solutions, we also need to accept the fact that business speed and agility requirements can conflict. To do this, we need to adopt technologies that can search for a larger range of interconnected systems at the edge and provide adaptive security policies for those systems. Security department heads must accept a degree of disruption and innovate amidst the chaos, rather than being obsessed with control.

　　Trend 5: VR and AR make a big splash

　　The epidemic has revolutionized the way people work, and one very important manifestation of this is the gradual expansion of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications.

　　We are seeing AR and VR technologies become increasingly popular in scenarios such as employee training, AR-assisted navigation (e.g. corporate campuses) and web conferencing. I attended a VR meeting this year and the meeting experience was very smooth and impressive. In a Zoom meeting, you get the distinct impression that you are on a video call. But in a VR meeting, after a few minutes you feel like everyone is meeting in a real room. In 2021, AR and VR deployments will make more progress thanks to advances in enterprise-level technology that will improve the security, user experience and device management of these solutions.

　　That said, I think the biggest shortcoming of VR is that there is no software available to everyone like Microsoft PowerPoint. In the future, I hope to enable rapid creation of 3D content that can be presented and used in VR mode. 360-degree panoramic capabilities offered by VR have not yet been fully explored, and we expect an easy-to-use tool to emerge that supports anyone to be able to create 3D content quickly. This will also be a key technology development direction for AR and VR technologists.

　　2020 is a year of unwavering technological advancement. The resilience of people to face unexpected situations, the courage to make changes and the wisdom of the crowd are well proven in this year. Both businesses and individuals become more efficient and flexible to adapt to new ways of working and living. Whichever way the new normal presents itself, 2021 will be a year of hope, and I firmly believe that technological advances will be the backbone of shaping this new normal.

*** Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) ***