Top 10 Technology Trends in 2022: What IT Solutions Will Dominate the Market?

The mentions of the Covid-19 impact on all life aspects, including the technologies development, has become overwhelming lately. Still, they seem to remain inevitable: nothing has made a more significant impact on the global economy. While destroying one industry keeps boosting the others; thus, the IT sector has only increased revenues since the pandemics' beginning. The latest IT spending forecasts show the growth of IT spending worldwide in 2021 and predict the same tendency in the following year. So, what will be in the highest demand, and what solutions will be in the top spending priorities in 2022?

The recent Gartner's research separated the latest technology trends into several major categories as follows:

• Technologies aimed at boosting cybersecurity measures;
• Custom software development for enhanced online user experience solutions;
• Location-independent solutions that help to streamline management workflows.

Large and small businesses have always required leveraging specific solutions to enable smooth operations and boost sales: eCommerce, cloud services, and remote offices did not appear yesterday. Still, the demand for safe and smooth user journeys and automation of processes has become much higher than ever before. 

The latest trends in information technology: what IT solutions will emerge in 2022?

Now that we defined the overall market situation, let's overview the biggest tech trends. They will probably be adopted by most businesses dealing with online operations.

Hyperautomation

The Gartner analysts suggested the term hyper-automation which means a beautiful idea of automating most labor-intensive operational processes. The point of hyper-automation is to simplify business workflows by intelligent integration of RPA platforms, machine learning, AI, or other digital tools with employee skills. In simple words, hyper-automation means leveraging complex systems to streamline operations and reduce manual labor.

For instance, a business dealing with paperwork can implement hyper-automation tools like OCR and ML. These tools will automatically capture data, transform it to various formats, and organize documents in the desired way. Another example: ML tools and RPA bots can become responsible for automated but personalized mailing, while chatbots can partly replace customer support employees.

There is no one-for-all approach to hyper-automation. Thus, the concept's agility might be one of the significant reasons analysts keep considering it as one of the top technology trends to boost productivity.

Anywhere Operations

If you google 'anywhere operations' using the pre-covid era time frame, you'll hardly find many relevant links. However, the Statista.com survey showed that more than half of respondents who work remotely were forced to switch to this format urgently and have never had a similar experience before. It convinced us that anywhere operations are a brand-new emerging trend. Having burst into most industries at the beginning of 2020, it still maintains its position in the trend ranking.

A chance to get back to 'normal' after the pandemic threats are over is tiny. Therefore, IT solutions for anywhere operations will only gain momentum in the upcoming year and probably forward. Besides, don't forget about the fully-remote companies like GitLab that have been successfully operated long before pandemics: their demand for anywhere operation solutions is here to stay.

So, what IT solutions will be in trend for maintaining anywhere operations? Let's name a few of them:

• Systems enabling fully-fledged remote work: task managers, work trackers, cloud offices, business web, and mobile apps; 
• Security systems for safe remote access;
• Automation tools for remote customer support services.

Distributed Enterprises

Anywhere operations trend leads to another tendency related to organizing offices and workflows within a company. This tendency implies switching to distributed enterprises instead of maintaining a centralized physical office. 

A distributed enterprise does not care about employees’ and clients’ location and applies particular technologies to maintain top-notch customer service and staff control. Such an approach to organizing operations is challenging and involves a complete revision of the previous management strategies. Still, there is hardly an alternative for most businesses today, so the trend will only grow in demand.

Hybrid cloud/ Multi-cloud

Cloud migration solutions have already become common for businesses, but technologies went further to offer more than a single option for enterprises. The latest tendencies show that companies long for agility and scalability for their infrastructures and the majority vote for hybrid and multi-cloud options. 

In short, the hybrid-cloud strategy involves using a combination of private and public clouds. Such an approach allows companies to enable accessibility for customers and prevent downtimes during crashes or maintenance works. 

Multi-clouds are predicted to be even a hotter trend: such a strategy allows for various providers to keep a single business infrastructure.

Cloud-Native Platforms

Cloud-native is a trending approach to app development that implies using microservice architecture. In simple words, a cloud-native app is not just adapted for a cloud-based infrastructure but is specifically designed for cloud models.

Why has cloud-native become a trend? Basically, for the same old reasons.

For instance, it is possible to update, scale, or restart a single microservice independently, making most maintenance work seamless for users.

AI and ML for Internet of Things

Analysts predict that the machine learning popularity peak will potentially accrue to 2022 and 2023, but the trend is already on hype. Integrating AI into various applications gives numerous opportunities to companies in multiple areas. Besides the most obvious things like chatbots that already successfully replace human agents, there is much more to discover.

For instance, integrating IoT with artificial intelligence is helpful for research work and cybersecurity. Such solutions allow us to predict cyber threats, boost the agility of management strategies, and find brand-new business opportunities.

Generative AI

Keeping with the AI topic, we can not but mention generative AI. This approach to machine learning is the next stage of the AI technologies evolution involving two neural networks. First, the one is responsible for identifying written, visual, or audial content and generating its original artifacts. Then, it learns with the help of the second neural net, performing as a supervisor and minimizing crucial mistakes.

Generative AI is a thing that can serve a vast number of industries, from healthcare to the arts. For instance, it can replace manual labor related to creating personalized advertising copies and images, source codes, or video content for marketing purposes and more.

Privacy-Enhancing Computation (PEC)

Data protection has become a top priority for all businesses operating in digital environments. New-gen safety measures enhance customer trust besides the most apparent urge to keep vital corporate data protected from cyberattacks. 

PEC approach implies minimizing the usage of personal data. The core idea of PEC technologies is to allow businesses to limit the personal information they collect from clients. For example, customers can hide their identity using pseudonyms when registering to some service or sharing personal data anonymously. In short, the less information a customer is forced to share, the safer they feel and the easier they become engaged.

More than half of online users claim to avoid services that are not transparent about personal data collection and storage. Therefore, an overall approach to customer data protection directly impacts sales. As a result, using privacy-enhancing computation solutions might become a basic need and thus remain on a trend.

Cybersecurity Mesh

We were in two minds whether we could call cybersecurity mesh just a modern trend: it seems to be a solution modern businesses cannot ignore under any circumstances. Companies are forced to keep loads of private data in virtual clouds, hire remote employees, and keep multichannel interactions with partners and customers. So is it even possible to stay unconcerned about the safety of the whole working environment?

No wonder the year 2022 will see a significant surge of demand for developing particular security systems. These systems will protect the whole infrastructure by creating a safe perimeter around a customer or an employee, no matter where. The complexity of such solutions is precisely what is called cybersecurity mesh, and the statistics below speak for themselves: the trend is growing by leaps and bounds.

Total Experience (TX)

The total experience approach should combine all possible experiences into a single complex strategy. To make it simpler, let's see what is involved in the TX concept:

• Multi Experience (MX) is the whole experience of a customer interacting with a brand in various ways;
• User Experience (UX) is about how smooth and convenient are your sites and apps;
• Customer Experience (CX) is what a client feels about the brand and its service quality;
• Employee Experience (EX) is related to how the brand interacts with employees.

The total experience idea implies considering all the mentioned experiences simultaneously, not separating them. In other words, Total Experience is about creating a loyal, friendly, and motivating environment for both clients and staff. TX-related solutions may involve custom software for business management, web and mobile apps with engaging features, CRM and ERP systems integrations, and more.

Final Words

Remote work is here to stay. So is the ever-growing competition in the digital economy, so no wonder most mentioned new technology trends are related to boosting customer experiences and keeping ahead of the game.

Solutions that have existed for some time now become a necessity from luxury and will keep dominating the IT market. On top of everything else, all these technologies will be applied for literally all industries: healthcare, eCommerce, telecommunications, education, and others, which creates unprecedentedly high demand.