It's no surprise that 2021 was a year of evolution for all sectors, due to the ever-changing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many tech leaders continued to adapt their strategies by shifting to a fully remote or hybrid work environment, increasing reliance on technology and the pursuit of digital-first strategies.  

So, how is the tech industry expected to evolve in the year to come? To start, many organizations have turned to investing in digital transformation and innovation, based on their specific needs. In fact, worldwide IT spending is expected to $4.47 trillion in 2022, according to new data from Gartner.

To elaborate on this, below tech experts have highlighted predictions for different areas of the tech industry in 2022.

Rafael Sweary, President and Co-Founder, WalkMe: 
"In 2022, we will see organizations analyzing and measuring those investments they made to their technology stack. What's working? What's not? It's time to reap the benefits. It's no longer going to be ok to have shelfware. For years, organizations have been running analytics on their websites but not doing the same for their other tech platforms, software, and apps. The shift to the need, and mandate, for analytics on all tech investments is coming, if not already here. No one can justify spending millions without proving its worth through strong analytics."

Sven Müller, IP Product Director, Colt Technology Services: 
"Future SD-WAN solutions will offer incredible scale, all of which will be done in near real-time and deliver on-demand connectivity. Think about adding a branch or multiple access circuits to one branch site and managing how this is load-balanced in split seconds. And, when it comes to enterprise functionality, SD-WAN solutions will need to sharpen themselves up in the ‘looks' department and become visually easier to navigate, with dashboards being physically easier to use.  

Added intelligence will include layering in tools like AI and machine learning to help get a better handle on the expanding intelligent edge. It won't be long before these networks become smarter, applications start fulfilling their own SLAs, and the networks have better control on understanding where packet loss emanates and how it can be curbed dynamically.  

Sure, the future of SD-WAN is not black and white, but it is inevitable. Agility is critical, so is on-demand and fluid bandwidth, cloud-native is key, and security is the next steppingstone in its evolution while SD-WAN solutions build more agile networks." 

James Winebrenner, CEO, Elisity:  
"The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the need to secure a permanently distributed and hybrid workforce. As we look to the future, organizations are realizing that while trendy approaches like SASE are useful for protecting remote workplaces, they cannot account for east <-> west traffic across managed or unmanaged devices. The goal now is to integrate multiple sources of identity across systems, legacy and new, and to assimilate them into a unified policy whether on-prem or in the cloud. In 2022 and beyond, we will see more and more enterprises move beyond cloud-only SASE models and point products to holistic solutions that protect data, apps and assets wherever they are being used." 

Rob Deal, Senior Vice President, Healthcare, Everise: 
"Healthcare providers will wrestle with how to maintain patient loyalty and will need to meet the expectations for their patient experiences to be successful. People have become accustomed to the seamless and easy experience that organizations like Doordash and Amazon provide - and expect it to be that easy to interact with any organization. Today, it can be easier to book a dog's grooming than their own doctor's appointments - and consumers will ultimately turn to easier interactions. Providers who make even incremental patient experience improvements in 2022 - say, improving timely responses to most asked questions, or launching friendly and seamless follow-ups with patients for wellness checks after procedures and checking medication adherence - will quickly stand out as the ‘easy to work with' choice in healthcare providers." 

Patrick Harr, CEO, SlashNext: 
"Multi-channel spear phishing attacks will continue to be the number one cybersecurity challenge that organizations face in 2022. Such attacks increased by 51 percent this year over 2020 - an already record-breaking year - and we'll see a similar jump next year. Since 95 percent of all cyber breaches start with spear phishing, we'll experience more data theft, ransomware attacks, and financial fraud in 2022. Any one of those attacks has the potential to be as chaotic and disruptive as attacks like the Colonial Pipeline one was this year.  There are several reasons these attacks are so dangerous. Attacks are arriving on all digital channels - including SMS/text, Slack, LinkedIn, Zoom, and much more -- and from legitimate infrastructure - like AWS, Azure, outlook.com, Google workspaces, and more.  

Moving completely to the cloud, using apps and browsers to increase productivity combined with the new reality of a hybrid remote/office working environment, means cybercriminals are targeting the most vulnerable and least protected parts of organizations - humans using apps and browsers. The same bad actors have become very sophisticated with access to easy-to-obtain and affordable automation technology. That enables them to deliver targeted spear-phishing attacks on a massive scale, through unprotected channels and move faster than many traditional phishing detection services. Protecting users from multi-channel phishing and human hacking will be an important trend in 2022. as phishing continues to move beyond email to include collaboration tools such as SMS/text, Slack, LinkedIn, Zoom and Microsoft Teams." 

Simon Taylor, CEO and Co-Founder, HYCU: 
"The entire COVID and pandemic experience has become in some ways a giant social experiment. We were able to brute force test many things. For example, how flexible work really works, how efficient is it for businesses to be in a flexible working model. Because of this, I don't think any of this is going away anytime soon.  

I see the future of work as supporting an increasingly flexible workforce inside of an increasingly flexible workspace. What I mean by that is that I think people will now feel almost every employer will have a heightened sense of comfort. Comfort with hiring people in relatively remote areas. At the same time, I think there is going to be a working expectation that regular office visits will need to take place, again for that important face-to-face time and collaboration time.  

I think the way that that paradigm shift plays itself out, even in terms of real estate, is actually that people are going to want more office space not less. I think people are going to want more social activities inside of an office space and potentially outdoor areas around an office space. People are going to want the flexibility to be in a private area as well as a collaborative space, or even in a space that may reflect some of the things that they enjoyed at home, sitting on a couch, open area, etc. A place where you can go to relax in between finishing a presentation. I believe we will continue to see increased flexibility in both the workplace as well as increased flexibility in the way that we work." 

Yinglian Xie, CEO and Co-Founder, Datavisor:
"Like other areas of cybercrime, we're seeing increasingly sophisticated fraud operations. As fraud prevention technologies evolve, so do the fraudsters', and the cycle will inevitably continue. The financial gain is immense and the dollar loss from the industry as a whole is rising rapidly, with no signs of slowing. Fraud operations are incredibly organized and efficient, and the digitization of everything is only making things easier. Massive banks of stolen information are readily available and allow precise targeting of systems around the world.  

With a deep understanding of the latest defense mechanisms, fraudsters are leveraging real user behavior to hijack sessions and exploit weak points like first-time logins. Using GPS simulation and device emulators, fraudsters can appear to be from any device anywhere in the world or hundreds simultaneously. Moving forward, fraudsters will continue innovating in response to advanced detection systems, and vice versa." 

Steve Schmidt, General Partner, Telstra Ventures: 
"As business units face greater cost and gross margin pressures, either from inflation or added competition, there will be a stronger demand for more AI and machine learning-based optimizations like Asapp, a Telstra Ventures investee that raised its $120 M Series C earlier this year. We're already seeing the early adopters of Asapp's AI/ML capability reduce their Contact Center costs by as much as 30%-60% while massively improving their Net Promoter Scores (NPS). When you're spending $1B per annum on contact centers, like the top US Banks, Telco's and Airlines, that's a saving of $300M - $600M annually. As market companies like American Airlines, JetBlue and Dish Network adopt more AI/ML at scale, their competitors will be forced to react.  In 2022, more companies will push the limits of what's possible with AI/ML in terms of driving real-world business impact." 

Rahul Pradhan, Head of Product and Engineering, Cloud Databases, Couchbase: 
"Leveraging software defined components, composability removes the need to manage the underlying infrastructure and eliminates the need to reconfigure physical assets like servers, storage and connectivity based on changes in the workload. With composable IT, enterprises are able to manage their applications or services through a single unified control plane that can span multiple clouds, on-premises and all the way to the edge. That's why today's globally distributed enterprises will embrace the concept of composability - not just for their on-premises infrastructures but also for their multi-cloud and edge deployments.

Looking at architectures and how they're evolving, enterprises will move away from monolithic architectures, toward building applications and infrastructures from component parts with well-defined interfaces. Businesses will continue to think about agility and simplicity when it comes to composing the infrastructure of technology stacks to achieve business goals - so the notion of composable businesses and applications will be a key trend."

Eric Bishard, Senior Developer Advocate, Couchbase: 
"More enterprises will begin to understand how inherently complex microservices are when used at scale. To position themselves for success, organizations will start by leveraging language-agnostic, autonomous and independently deployable microservices at a smaller scale (starting with 2-3 components and not scaling out horizontally). Developers will pay attention to each module, make sure microservices are unit testable and loosely coupled - that way, if one microservices relies on other types of data and the model needs to be changed, other microservices won't be impacted. Moving forward - testing, planning, attention to detail, ensuring each component is autonomous and educating all developers on proper microservices approaches will be key to successful adoption." 

Alexis Richardson, Co-Founder and CEO, Weaveworks: 
"Enterprises have missed the ‘app store moment' largely because each organization has been running their own infrastructure for the past decades. While the adoption of Containers is providing the next level of abstraction to encapsulate applications and brings us closer to the app store ideal, it's really Kubernetes that adds the security and management that will finally turn enterprise software into an asset. Companies want to use the same core platform everywhere so they can focus on the same skill set, the same tools, the same way of thinking, but not the same data centers. In 2022, we'll see GitOps increasingly deemed essential for product management-oriented DevOps teams to deliver standardization for enterprises' core platforms so that people, their most important asset, can truly focus on delivering applications." 

Danelle Au, CMO, Ordr: 
"Attackers are going straight to recruiting insiders for advanced attacks. Organizations have rightly focused on shoring up their identity and access management capabilities and deploying multi-factor authentication within their networks. These solutions have made it harder for attackers to bypass defenses. Now, attackers that cannot access networks via typical means are going directly to insiders and recruiting them to install malware with the promise of big payouts. Ransomware gangs are now promising insiders a cut of the ransom in exchange for access. These tactics being used by these attackers are similar to HUMINT espionage and recruitment programs, and unfortunately this means that every security leader needs to now consider insider-originated malware as part of their ransomware protection strategy.

Over the last several years, the urgency in dealing with ransomware and other advanced attacks at the legislative level has grown - hence bills like Warren-Ross, and a 30-country meeting led by the Biden administration to address the threat of ransomware, and efforts by FBI in cracking down on ransomware gangs. However, political and legislative efforts won't make a difference as long as cybercrime makes sense economically, and as long as Russia has no incentive to bring threat actors to justice. One possible way to reduce these advanced attacks, though controversial, is to eliminate the anonymity associated with cryptocurrency payments. Without an easy way to pay ransom, these attacks will decrease. Additionally, more scrutiny is needed on cyber insurance as this practice is also facilitating easy payments for threat actors and correspondingly fueling more cyberattacks." 

Paul Stringfellow, analyst, GigaOm: 
"The next steps in enterprise security management - the move to cloud has opened up many opportunities for the enterprise to improve their security and deliver protections that have been traditionally difficult. This will see an increase of adoption of ever more robust and crucial capabilities such as just in time admin access, rights management (so the security becomes embedded in the information), full adoption of data loss prevention technologies across the enterprise. Data security remains critical to the enterprise, the tools are there and more will begin to adopt them." 

Michael Delzer, analyst, GigaOm:  
"Windows 11 will trigger a large PC/laptop purchase spike in the second half of 2022 after being delayed by global shipping issues. Historically each launch of a new Windows desktop OS has resulted in large spikes in PC sales and the trigger for replacing obsolete software that will no longer run on the new OS. The biggest issue is that by working with Android apps Microsoft has finally a response to Apple that may create a competitive advantage of phone/tablet/Windows interoperability. This at a time when cars are shipping with Android car integration will put pressure on Apple to keep its leadership on integration with life. 
 
Global supply chain disruption will start to impact corporate, and cloud physical growth as local parts caches are exhausted and too many manufactured products are stuck in shipping delays. This could trigger a large volume of last generation products arriving at the same time as the next generation products are being manufactured causing buyers to choose to delay purchases or accept the older product to address immediate needs."

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