It's no surprise that 2020 was a year of evolution for all sectors, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many tech leaders had to pivot their strategies by shifting to a largely remote-work model and look to new markets that were impacted by unforeseen economic impacts.   

So, how will the tech industry evolve in the new year? Organizations are still expected to analyze key technologies to invest in for the new year, based on their specific needs. In fact, despite the impact of the pandemic, IT spending worldwide is expected to reach about 3.75 trillion U.S. dollars in 2021, according to Statistica.

Below tech experts below discuss trends and predictions for the tech industry in the new year.

Patrick Harr, CEO, SlashNext: 
"Over the last 30 days, 10% of company users were phished, according to live data we compiled across more than 100 large and mid-sized enterprises. Every day, SlashNext Threat Labs detect 21,000 new phishing attacks, almost double the number of threats from a year ago, and SlashNext Threat Labs are seeing an alarming 50-75% attacks getting past conventional phishing defenses to compromise enterprise networks. So, if you think your current defenses will keep you safe, think again. And in 2021, we anticipate this problem will get much, much worse." 

Anshu Sharma, CEO and co-founder, Skyflow: 
"Every large company is on a long-term transition to digital and cloud - so they can effectively compete against the likes of Amazon, and the Silicon Valley startups who are aiming for them. Companies like Nike, JP Morgan Chase, and Walgreens have been trying to transform and in 2020 they all got an unintended boost in their push to the cloud - because they had to. The Fortune 500, having seen relative success with cloud and digital are not going back. They are all doubling down. 2021 will be the year of the digital double down." 

Abhijit Ghosh, co-founder and CEO, Confluera:  
"Modern attacks focus on finding the weakest link in your security ecosystem and gaining an initial foothold in an enterprise network. Once in the network, bad actors move laterally, patiently focused on achieving their mission. Thus, today's cybersecurity landscape can no longer rely on just keeping the bad people out; it also requires the ability to detect and track every step an attacker has taken to search and traverse the network in pursuit of their goal. 

In 2021, we will see more organizations continue to increase reliance on cloud computing, and thus need to employ new cybersecurity paradigms to better protect themselves in that environment. Because of this, in the new year it is anticipated that organizations will rely on technologies such as XDR, which eliminate guesswork and instead deterministically combine individual findings with causal sequencing of all events across the infrastructure to understand the precise attack progression in real-time." 

William McKnight, analyst, Gigaom:

"In 2021, there will be an explosion in sensor-based time-series data such as:

• 5G and IoT Driving AI 
• Sensor-based Data Sources Expand
• Time Series Data Explosion
• Data for each point in time
• The data collectively represents how a system/process/behavior changes over time
• Scale and usability of time series data."
  

Cornelia Davis, CTO, Weaveworks: 
"2021 will see the emergence of common distributed operational patterns widely implemented across all industries, and with the coming of 5G and the edge, this could not be timelier. There are several signals that foreshadow this, such as the adoption of GitOps as a defacto standard and best practice for operating Kubernetes and its workloads. IT systems will not only enjoy greater resilience, and security, but having GitOps in place also lays the foundation for massive scalability and growth." 

Judd Bagley, Vice President of Marketing, Everise: 
"The cloud made a rapid move to remote work possible, but the problem of training decentralized hardware support agents to the same high degree of familiarity as agents with easy access to on-site product labs remains to be elegantly solved by internet-delivered technologies. Complex consumer-focused connected device makers in particular must derive creative approaches to delivering ongoing, immersive virtual or hands-on product training to agent homes, now scattered broadly across the globe. The latter will require overcoming multiple logistical and technological hurdles, as user satisfaction and broad market penetration hang in the balance."

Krishna Subramanian, president and COO at Komprise: 
"In 2021, cloud storage costs begin to overtake compute costs. For the past three years, cloud cost optimization has been a key priority for businesses. In fact, Gartner predicted that 80% of businesses will outspend their cloud budgets in 2020. A bulk of these costs so far has been in the compute, since cloud object storage is relatively cost effective. But this is changing, since cloud file storage is typically ten times more expensive than S3, and file data is way more voluminous than block data - all of which underscores the importance of using cloud file storage just when you need it. In 2021, enterprise IT organizations will begin adopting cloud data management solutions to understand how cloud data is growing and manage its lifecycle efficiently across the various cloud file and object storage options."

Saad Siddiqui, principal, Telstra Ventures:

"The unrelenting pace of open source innovation will continue in 2021, particularly in the areas of data analytics and data infrastructure, leaving many Fortune 1000 businesses and other SMBs struggling to keep pace with, and integrate with, open source innovations. Unlike large tech players, who can afford to hire an army of engineers to constantly change things and add their own herbs and spices to improve their operations, most businesses and newer vendors don't have as many talented engineers or can't hire more engineers to keep pace with change. To address this talent wall, we're seeing the rise of a hybrid open source business model, whereby open source data analytics companies like Incorta and infrastructure companies like Rancher Labs monetize closed source, out-of-the-box capabilities that deliver open source innovations while requiring less time and resources for enterprises to derive value."

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