Columnist Peter Russell Managing Director of Telefónica Tech Ireland
IT Trends To Look Out For This Year I
f the past two years have proved anything, it is the importance of flexibility and adaptability. To prepare for the challenges that the rest of 2022 will bring, including supply chain issues, the pandemic, cybercrime, and of course, Brexit, Telefónica Tech’s Peter Russell identifies some key trends likely to shape digital transformation initiatives in 2022. Cybersecurity is a priority: To prevent system outages and costly losses, and to maximise the economic benefits from transforming their technology, reducing cybercrime needs to be a major priority this year. Side by side with the focus on cybersecurity, we will see a rise in spend on AI and automation technologies. Furthermore, to ensure the applications and data held within cloud and data centre solutions are better protected, implementing a zero-trust approach will be high on all business agendas for the next 12 months. That said, with the greater adoption of cloud technologies, continued remote working, and the increasing cost of preventing cyber threats, only organisations who can access external expertise and advanced cybersecurity solutions will be able to meet these challenges. Increased cloud spend: Gartner predicts that global end-user spending on public cloud services is expected to exceed $480 billion globally next year. 2022 in particular is expected to see an increase in public sector spending on cloud, especially for the health sector. A move to public cloud will improve operational efficiency and agility; especially if you consider the supply chain issues causing long wait times for hardware from global vendors. These delays are untenable for organisations
with rapidly growing storage needs. The immediacy of cloud as an alternative solution is one reason why we are likely to see even more rapid adoption in 2022. The greater focus on providing shared care and Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) is set to unlock data from proprietary formats across different areas of healthcare. The digitalisation process is going to be long and slow but there is an urgency – the pandemic has caused a significant backlog in elective care. Platforms in the future will be designed around individual patients; this means referrals, results and diagnostic data will all feed into a personalised data stream in a patient’s own cloud. Cloud infrastructure will also be used for data storage for community diagnostic hubs to overcome the problem of siloed patient data. The way the health sector uses cloud in 2022 and beyond will be an interesting case study, with learnings for the wider public sector looking for effective cloud models. Growing focus on meeting sustainability goals: For businesses to meet sustainability goals, eg the COP26 target for Net Zero by 2050, organisations ultimately need to move away from private data centres. McKinsey research shows that data centres have been known to emit a massive 80 megatonnes of carbon dioxide a year. With high carbon emissions, companies will need to reassess their energy consumption to avoid large fines in the future. Hyperscalers such as Amazon and Microsoft can increase their investment in data centres and implement environmentally sustainable strategies due to their scale, and ongoing investment in research and development. For example, Microsoft
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has been researching a large data centre in the sea in Scotland that runs well on what most land-based data centres consider an unreliable grid. Underwater data centres have proven that fewer parts need changing, and the cool water stops the machinery from overheating. In addition, their grid is supplied by 100% wind and solar energies. Many smaller organisations will need to take the same sustainable steps next year, which is why a move to public cloud and third-party hosted data centres can immediately boost sustainability goals. Some reports suggest migrations to the cloud can reduce CO2 emissions by 59 million tonnes per year which equates to taking 22 million cars off the road. That said, some organisations will never be able to move everything to public cloud, either because it is simply not economically viable, or because certain types of data are too sensitive. For this reason, a hybrid approach will still be key to any cloud strategy for 2022 and beyond. Overall: The pandemic has brought a tremendous technological shift and transformation across every industry globally. We have seen increased spending on cloud in just about every sector but especially in the public sector, as well as further investment in digital innovation and sustainability. Tech has been harnessed to tackle the response to and recovery from the pandemic, as well as helping us to become more sustainable. In 2022 we will see periods of uncertainty as businesses enter into the recovery phase and how they are forced to adapt. It is certainly an exciting time to be in the technology sector and we should all look forward to the development and opportunities that this year will bring.
