Top technology priorities for DX in 2021

Amidst a challenging business environment, enterprises are accelerating their digital transformation (DX) efforts to survive the impact of a global business disruption. Emerging DX trends and technologies are evolving as central components of modern business strategy, enabling organisations to implement agile and adaptable business models for these trying times. We take a look at some of these developments.

With businesses around the world still wrestling with the pandemic, the mantra of “digital first, remote first”¹ has come to apply as much to employees as it does to business partners and customers.

Strict lockdowns have catalysed a shift in technology to support the new model of work.  There was rapid adoption of work-from-home (WFH) technologies such as Zoom, Google Meet, Webex and Microsoft Teams. Businesses also invested in WFH devices such as notebooks, virtual desktop infrastructure and new secure connectivity options such as software defined networks that afforded greater flexibility than traditional virtual private networks.

With employees now better equipped with the tools to be productive regardless of their physical location, and the government continuing to exhort employers to allow work from home wherever possible, the digital and remote model is likely to continue gaining momentum even as lockdowns start to ease.

So how do enterprises secure a “digital first, remote first” work and business environment? With many assets now existing outside the traditional security perimeter, perimeter defences are no longer enough to protect the enterprise.

Instead, the new approach to cyber resilience will be to define security around the identity of a person or thing. Individuals are granted access only to the applications that they need to carry out their work. This paves the way for a more modular, responsive security approach by centralising policy orchestration and distributing policy enforcement.

Another important development in the cyber resilience space will be the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities to keep pace with the sheer volume of attacks and the speed at which they are evolving. AI/ML can quickly analyse user behaviours, detect abnormalities or irregularities in the network, and “learn” to identify evolving cyber vulnerabilities.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a data-driven automation process whereby software robots take over the monotonous and mundane time-consuming tasks performed by humans. This boosts business efficiency by improving process quality, speed and productivity.

During the COVID-19 lockdowns, RPA demonstrated how business processes could continue to be executed efficiently and without error regardless of external forces and disruption.

In 2021, we will see AI/ML blended into the rule-based automation capabilities of RPA to give rise to intelligent process automation. This will open new possibilities for a smart and sophisticated automation system that is constantly learning and evolving to meet the changing needs of businesses.

RPA and cybersecurity are just two of the many areas where AI/ML will have a growing impact. As computing power becomes more and more affordable and the cloud opens access to a wide range of AI tools, the technology is now accessible to businesses big and small. In 2021, we can expect AI use cases to proliferate as the technology plays an increasingly important role in business forecasting and decision-making.

For example, in workforce planning and optimisation, AI can help businesses make decisions on the employees and skills that they will need in the future. In making pricing decisions, an AI engine can ingest a richer spectrum of data on opportunities, win rates, sales, customer behaviour and a host of other parameters to make its recommendations.

Other applications of AI in decision range from fraud detection and stock optimisation to early detection and diagnosis of medical problems and suicide prevention. The possibilities are, to borrow a cliché, limited only by the imagination. 

Edge computing – the ability to perform compute processes on local devices closer to where data is collected - has the potential to enable quicker decision making for timely, automated responses, especially when combined with AI/ML capabilities and big data generated by the Internet of Things (IoT).

In 2021, we will see many more use cases where edge devices “learn” from the data that they collect to provide predictive analysis and power autonomous systems.

In a pandemic scenario, for example, video camera inputs combined with computer vision algorithms can help determine if employees are complying with masking and social distancing protocols and automated announcements will be triggered if violations are detected.

In an industrial setting, intelligent edge devices can analyse operational and performance data from the manufacturing IoT network to improve production system performance and predict when machines will require maintenance.

The pandemic has helped catalyse enterprise adoption of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). With limitations on travel and the high costs involved, AR/VR helped to meet the need for "face to face" interaction with clients, customers or colleagues.

In the continued absence of physical classes or workshops, AR/VR can help meet the training needs of all kinds of businesses, where previously the uptake was mainly for high-risk and expensive training in industries such as oil and gas, mining, healthcare and defence.

In other AR/VR use cases, maintenance work can be carried out remotely without engineers or technicians having to be on site. Instead, they will be able to use immersive technologies like an AR headset or, increasingly, mobile AR on their devices, to provide remote maintenance support or guidance to their colleagues.

In 2021, we can expect more and more businesses to turn to these technologies to create immersive experiences for customers and to allow employees to work, interact or train in simulation environments.

Emerging DX trends and technologies such as remote work, edge computing and AR/VR adoption will catalyse the rollout of 5G, which is needed to support the growing number of devices, IoT sensors and the exponential increase in rich media traffic.

By integrating 5G technology, end-to-end latency for VR/AR can be reduced to milliseconds, enhancing the user experience. Always-connected PCs, equipped with full 5G connectivity, will allow users to connect on their laptops the same way they do on their mobile phones, improving productivity.  

And in use cases where real-time response is critical – such as the navigation of autonomous vehicles (AV) – 5G delivers the speed required for communication between intelligent edge devices and the AV controller in order to mimic human responses.

Software-Defined Anything (SDx) is about the use of software to provision, manage and control different kinds of hardware systems, enabling greater flexibility, agility and speed in infrastructure deployment.

During the pandemic, this proved to be a compelling factor in SDx adoption, especially Software-Defined Networking (SDN), as businesses rushed to provision the connectivity needed for new work-from-home models and intensified remote collaboration. Other SDx segments include storage, hypervisors and data centres.

According to a report² by Global Industry Analysts, the global market for SDx, which was estimated at US$11.9 billion in 2020, is now projected to reach US$70.5 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 28.9 percent over the analysis period.

The autonomous cloud infrastructure is a new generation of cloud with self-provisioning, self-configuring capabilities. For example, autonomous databases and operating systems in the cloud are able to make use of machine learning algorithms to automatically and continuously patch, tune, back up, and upgrade themselves without manual intervention, while the system is running.

By taking human intervention out of the equation, one of the most compelling benefits of autonomous systems is the elimination of human errors, such as misconfiguration that could result in malfunctioning systems or create security loopholes that could be exploited by threat actors.

Get started with digital transformation in the new normal.

¹ Gartner, Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021, October, 2020.

²  Global Industry Analysts, Inc, Software-Defined Anything - Global Market Trajectory & Analytics, July 2020.