Top 10 Tech Trends of 2022

Data fabric

“Astrologers proclaim the year of data". Data matters more than ever.

As the most valuable resource, data can help businesses:

1. Understand their customers better
2. Identify new opportunities
3. Make informed decisions that lead to successful outcomes

Data curation, business intelligence, and advanced analytics emerge as vital mechanisms of decision-making processes today.

Data fabric is an end-to-end data integration solution, providing:

• enhanced data management
• automation of data discovery, governance, and consumption
• transparency of the analytics process
• metadata analytics to determine current data utilization patterns
• unified, consistent UX

Data fabric architecture optimizes access to distributed data and makes it possible to integrate its core management capabilities. The point is to connect the right data to the right people. Such a system doesn't depend on the environment, use, and geolocation. Data is accessible just in time and regardless of where it's stored.

Within inbuilt analytics reading metadata, data fabric learns what data is being used. As a result, it can make recommendations for more and better solutions to deliver business-ready data for analytics and AI.

Fresh Fact

Real-life use case: Data fabrics solve real-world problems using AI techniques. The Finnish city of Turku found its innovation held back by data gaps: by implementing a knowledge graph framework for data management and exploring business problems, it built reusable data products, reduce time-to-market, and create a monetizable data fabric.

Cybersecurity mesh

The distribution of digital business assets across the cloud and data centers is still trending and is not going to subside soon. According to Gartner, by 2024, businesses adopting a cybersecurity mesh architecture will reduce the financial impact of individual security incidents by an average of 90%.

The composable security approach shifts 'traditional' fragmented systems focused on enterprise perimeters. Cybersecurity mesh architecture enables the creation of scalable and interoperable services, avoiding vulnerabilities and data breaches.

Its integrated structure secures all assets, regardless of geolocation. With a cybersecurity mesh method, you can combine multiple data feeds from different security products to work as a cooperative ecosystem and identify and respond to incidents in the best possible way.

Business To-Do List: first steps

• Make composability and interoperability a priority while choosing security solutions
• Implement a common base framework to compose security solutions and integrate different tools

Autonomic systems

As your business grows, traditional manual management often can't scale at the same speed. In many cases, an autonomic systems approach is the best way to avoid delays.

Autonomic systems are self-managing physical/software systems that learn from their own environments. Such an approach provides plenty of pros:

• rapid response to changes
• dynamic algorithms that can be modified with no software updates
• ‍advanced management at the scale of complex environments

Fresh Fact

Real-life use case: Ericsson's (a Swedish leading networking and telecommunication services provider) autonomic systems use reinforcement learning and AI-driven digital twins to dynamically optimize 5G performance, including availability, ultra-reliability, low latency, and high security.

Privacy-enhancing computation

As already mentioned, data is one of the most valuable assets businesses can produce – and keep safe. And that is where privacy-enhancing computation comes into play.

Privacy-enhancing computation (PEC) approaches create value but preserve privacy. Firstly, it is about:

• encrypting
• splitting/preprocessing sensitive data
• ensuring confidentiality
• sharing data across software ecosystems

Companies can combine several techniques to make up the privacy-enhancing computation, such as:

• Zero-knowledge protocol
• Differential privacy
• Secure multi-party computation
• Homomorphic encryption
• Trusted execution environment

Cloud-native platforms

By 2025, cloud-native platform usage will increase by 40% compared to 2021. And there are a number of reasons for that.

The lift-and-shift cloud migration approach requires a complex process of moving legacy workloads to the cloud. Since they weren't designed for the cloud, their maintenance becomes time-consuming and inefficient. What is more, such an approach doesn't take full advantage of cloud attributes.

At this time, cloud-native platforms benefit from cloud computing scalability and allow:

• delivering faster time to value
• reducing dependencies on infrastructure
• freeing up time to focus on functionality

Imposing practical constraints on costs and timeline is necessary to create realistic project budgets. Failing to do so results in projects being completed at exorbitant expense, or prematurely terminated for lack of funds.

Steven Johnson

science author & media theorist

Composable applications

According to Gartner, by 2024, the design motto for new SaaS and custom applications will be 'composable API-first or API-only!' leaving behind their predecessors.

Composable apps consist of packaged-business capabilities (PBCs) or software-defined business objects. The idea behind the composable app is that these functional blocks can be dissociated from the complete application or process. Firstly, it is about moving away from single, complex apps to modular business units that can be composed into workflows for particular business cases. Also, they can be swiftly integrated across an organization's tech stack.

Business To-Do list: first steps

• Implement composable architectural approaches in all-new tech initiatives, such as new engineering, choosing new services, etc.
• Buy access to PBCs on application marketplaces

Fresh Fact

Real-life use case: Ally, one of the leading American financial services companies, has created PBCs representing repeatable capabilities that can be assembled in low-code environments. Such implementation saves 200,000+ hours of manual work.

Hyperautomation

Digitalization and operational improvement cycle firstly imply widespread automation. In other words, it requires hyperautomation.

It's a trending business-driven approach to identify, vet and automate as many workflow processes as possible. Hyperautomation orchestrates use of multiple technologies tools and platforms, including:

• low-code platforms
• process mining toolkit
• robotic process automation

Business To-Do List: first steps

• Establish holistic mapping rather than unconnected units of task automation to ensure synergistic business outcomes

Distributed enterprise

The distributed enterprise approach arose from two key reasons. Remote employees required specific toolkits and increased flexibility, while consumers became less accessible through traditional 'physical avenues'.

So the story of distributed enterprise began. It's a virtual first, remote first architectural principle designed to

• digitize customer touchpoints
• build out up-to-date experiences to support products
• improve customer-facing technologies

To stay ahead in innovation, look at horizontal industries and the ones leading your current industry, someone is always doing something new.

Jeff Butler

author & keynote speaker

Fresh Fact

Real-life use case: Armoire's digital dressing room allows customers to try styles virtually. It was designed to simulate an in-person try-on session by allowing members to upload pics of their favorite looks and add them to the personal account.

Decision intelligence & generative AI

AI engineering is a cross-domain, game-changing discipline that involves operationalizing updates to artificial intelligence models. It uses integrated data and development pipelines to deliver consistent business value. The triad of integrated data, analytics, and AI allows the creation of decision intelligence platforms to support, augment and automate decisions.

In the world of rapid change, businesses face dynamic and unpredictable challenges. Therefore, it's crucial to make fast and accurate decisions.

Business To-Do List: first steps

• Establish engineering practices integrating the best methods from DataOps, ModelOps, and DevOps
• Identify your business areas that can be improved with more data-driven support and accelerated with AI-powered solutions.
• Make AI engineering a strategic benefit for maintaining product value

Total experience

Technology determines the future of industries and helps businesses grow their presence. New tech trends continue to redefine the customer journey map, and creating superior shared experiences is one of the trending tasks for today.

The so-called total experience (TX) interlinks four digital areas: user, customer, employee, multi experience (UX, CX, EX, MX). This omni experience aims to interconnect and enhance each of these subparts, find common touchpoints, and combine their features universally for building a more holistic approach.

Innovation takes birth in sync with the evolution of customers' expectations and demands or vice versa. Organizations around the world have to continually innovate themselves and keep up with the people's wants.

Ketan Kapoor

entrepreneur, co-founder at Iyurved

Technology development is an all-pervading process that fuels and transforms different areas of life.

Tech trend is always firstly about knowledge and suitable implementation. It serves as a source of different solutions you can combine and customize for your specific business needs.

How can you do it in the best way? Freshcode welcomes you to discuss it. Fill out the form on our website or contact our representative on Linkedin.

P.S.: We thank Gartner for the research of Top Technology Trends 2022 which provides all the insights we've listed in this article.