2020 has been a challenging year for most of us. It was the year of global scale pandemic. Looking back to 2020 we saw some interesting technology trends.
Rise of remote work
Many organizations established ad-hoc work from home solutions. Gradually they are turning into permanent work from home solutions. Both employers and employees are seeing the benefits of working from home, so much so that it is now becoming ingrained into their corporate DNA. The VS Group had the privilege of rolling out work from home solutions for several enterprise and banking customers in Sri Lanka.
Rise of Cloud and SaaS
Covid-19 hit the hardware supply chains hard. Large server and PC manufacturers were unable to cater the surge of demand for hardware and people quickly turned to the cloud to meet their demands. All key cloud players including AWS, Azure, Google and Oracle cloud platforms announced increased utilization.
Increased Focus on Digital Channels
Banks and non banking institutions increased their focus on Digital channels. Throughout the year we saw an increased focus on technologies such as mobile wallets, agentless banking, Omnichannel banking, chatbots and other digital transformation initiatives. Some of our key solutions supported these directives and we would be able to announce some of our success stories in 2021.
Rise of Healthcare IT
With the pandemic many countries started developing the use of Information technology for healthcare. This included initiatives such as telemedicine, collaboration solutions and solutions such as PACS and HIS systems. We believe that this initiative will increase the healthcare technology landscape in the long run.
Growth of Digital Commerce
The pandemic disrupted the business models around the entire supply chains. Physical presence became less and less relevant while Digital presence and ability to transact digitally became essential for most businesses to survive.
Increased Threat Landscape
Work from home brought in new security challenges for Cybersecurity professionals. A growing need to protect corporate data, data classification, controlling the corporate data in remote machines became top information security priorities. There were multiple large scale data breaches which reminded all of us of the value of securing corporate information. We hope that technologies such as APT prevention, SIEM and Security Analytics would become key building blocks of IT security strategy.
THE OUTLOOK FOR THE YEAR 2021
Everyone is praying for a better 2021. We believe that the willpower of the humankind to withstand the challenges thrown at them would win against the pandemic. In terms of technology and market experience in multiple geographies including APAC and EMEA, we expect the below technology trends will play a pivotal role in 2021.
Analytics and Big Data
Organizations will continue to focus on reducing costs and optimizing profits. Technologies such as Data Science and Analytics would play a pivotal role in this process. Increased visibility would help the Customers to make informed decisions. Technologies such as AI will augment this process and provide automated recommendations.
Cybersecurity Security
AI will dominate Cybersecurity technology and we see many technology providers are integrating Artificial intelligence in their technology stacks. This will drive the automation and orchestration of Cybersecurity events such as identifying and mitigating threats.
Automation
Even though many countries are rolling out vaccines, the present measures of social distancing and remote work will continue to dominate 2021 as well. Therefore organizations will also roll out initiatives to automate the repetitive work of FTEs with bots. Many industries are using intelligent bots to automate tasks such as employee onboarding, fraud management, etc.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
As banks and non banking financial organizations are using digital channels to facilitate transactions, there would be increased focus on regulatory aspects such as fraud management. AI and ML will play a pivotal role in validating the identities of the users, flagging fraudulent transactions , etc.
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR | |
 | Sadeepa PalliyaguruSadeepa is the Director / Chief Innovation Officer of VS ONE where he also specializes in Public Cloud Solutions and Information Security. He has over 10 years of experience in Software Development and Strategic Consulting and is also skilled in Technical Communication and Enterprise Systems. As a Solutions Architect, he has been instrumental in the design and development of multiple cloud and Software defined infrastructure solutions in Sri Lanka and overseas. |
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