2022 Technologies to Watch

This editorial reviews technologies poised to be differentiators and growth engines for businesses in 2022 based on current technology, consumer, and economic trends. The intended audience is technology enthusiasts, technologists, and individuals shaping the IT landscape within their organizations as leaders or contributors. Disclaimer; these are not new technologies but powerhouses of innovation in their infancy that will shape industries as they evolve. 

2021 was a period of continued growth for the digital, on-demand economy accelerated in 2020 due to the COVID pandemic. Individuals are re-assessing work/life balance and looking to technology to manage personal and professional responsibilities. Employees are seeking flexibility and remote work options. Business-to-Consumer (e.g uber, Instacart) and Business-to-Business (e.g AWS, AZURE, GCP) customers are demanding better, cheaper solutions with the convenience and speed of instant provisioning of goods and services on a global scale. 2020 saw a greater than 10x increase in the adoption of digital technologies like Zoom whose brand recognition has gone from little to known to household name. Global economic reliance on technology is at its highest level and increasing. Technologies that strengthen cybersecurity and compliance, enable trust networks, drive intelligent extrapolation and robotics, increase scale and elasticity, and power innovation will be 2022 differentiators. These categories are Identity Access Management (IAM), Blockchain, Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Cloud Computing. Beyond these prominent differentiators, we have cryptocurrency, NFTs, and metaverse which will continue to evolve in the FinTech industry with questions around regulation being front and center. 

Themes: Scale & Elasticity, Innovation / Technology: Cloud Computing

As companies grow, they need the ability to scale computing, storage, and database capacity up or down in minutes while maintaining a global, multi-region presence without the overhead of multiple data centers or maintenance of excess hardware. Companies also need access to innovative technology platforms and Saas solutions that will enable them to innovate faster with reduced financial risk. Cloud computing enables this trend which is what makes it so disruptive. It is among the most important advancements of the 21st century. Cloud computing is driving innovation across other disruptive categories such as AI. For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers an end-to-end machine learning platform (SageMaker) that includes an integrated development environment and solutions for every step of the process from data labeling to model deployment. AWS also provides several AI Saas solutions that companies can start using immediately.  

Theme: Intelligent Extrapolation & Robotics / Technology: Generative AI 

Data is at the heart of Generative AI-based innovation. This innovation drives intelligent extrapolation (intelligent extrapolation is defined herein as the process of using existing data to generate future data points) and robotics advancements. GPUs can process and label mass amounts of data using artificial intelligence algorithms that use existing content like text, audio files, or images to create new plausible content; this process is Generative AI. It enables computers to extrapolate underlying patterns related to input data, and then use that to generate similar content. The content can train new machine learning models, re-train existing machine learning models to be less biased, allow robots to comprehend more abstract concepts, and drive high-quality content outputs through self-learning for every data point.

Theme: Trust Networks / Technology: IAM 

The Cybersecurity landscape evolved with the COVID-induced, widespread transition to remote work models across every industry. This combined with the growth in IoT, smart devices, hybrid-cloud deployment models, and 5G has increased the cyber-attack surface with ecosystems of inter-dependent technologies and networks reliant on each other. Trust networks are defined herein as communities of technologies, networks, and devices that are securely interconnected. Interconnected networks increase the number of entry points and attack vectors that cybercriminals may exploit to impact systems and access valuable data as it flows between Saas/Iaas applications, data centers, remote devices, IoT devices, and more. IAM authentication and authorization guardrails are a component of trust networks.

Authentication is front-door access control that works by validating a user's credentials through an identity provider (E.g Active Directory) before allowing access. Once in a network, users must be authorized to access resources or perform specific actions (CRUDE). Authorization is fine-grain access control that enables system owners to implement "least privilege". Account owners can create environment-specific roles to limit how users or services access account resources through policies and permissions. Authentication controls can be expanded beyond a single network using federated identity. Federated identity enables service providers (E.g AWS) to serve as identity brokers that can communicate with outside identity providers (E.g Okta, Ping Identity, Active Directory) to obtain credentials and enable access across systems and networks.  

Theme: Compliance / Technology: Blockchain

Digital compliance mechanisms drive cross-organizational adherence to policies and procedures and are especially important in highly regulated industries (e.g finance and medicine). These industries rely on compliance mechanisms to validate that operations are in-line with mandatory regulatory standards (e.g HIPAA, PCI). Blockchain technology incorporates an immutable digital ledger and is poised to be a disruptive force in compliance applications.

Although Blockchain was created to streamline and manage cryptocurrency transactions, the two innovations are not co-dependent. Blockchain provides a system for recording information through a digital ledger-based process that makes it impossible to change, hack, or cheat the system. This is because ledger transactions are distributed across an entire blockchain network of computer systems. As such, if a ledger is changed within one system, it will easily be identifiable based on the discrepancy of the ledger relative to the other ledgers. 

Blockchain lends itself to the application of proof-of-process for compliance because it can be used to track steps required by regulation. This is because the recording of actions and their outputs in a non-fungible digital ledger creates an audit trail for regulators to verify compliance.

Theme: Cryptocurrency, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), & Metaverse

Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and the Metaverse are early-stage innovations with minimal regulation, lots of buzz, and trillions of investment dollars. Cryptocurrencies are garnering significant attention because of their decentralized nature; they are digital currencies on decentralized networks based on blockchain technology which enables counterfeit protection. The first decentralized cryptocurrency, BitCoin, was created in 2009. Since then, 100s of coins have been introduced. In 2015, NFTs were introduced as digital collectibles that can be easily traded on a blockchain platform. NFTs capture moments in history and other collectible pieces of art into one-of-a-kind, verifiable digital assets. NFTs are currently using the Ethereum based blockchain platform. If we go one step deeper from digital currency and collectibles, we get the metaverse which is the notion of immersive digital technology. Although the metaverse became mainstream in 2021, the term has been around since the 1990s. While there is a significant amount of excitement around these ideas of the digital world, it remains to be seen what kind of impact they will have as they have yet to be introduced to much regulation. Cryptocurrencies are poised to disrupt the financial industry because they were created as an alternative to traditional banking. They don't need an intermediary and are not tethered to the capacity of a centralized government or bank because trust is placed in the blockchain code and its distributed nature. It will be interesting to watch how regulatory bodies respond and which cryptocurrencies survive as relevant currencies.