The New Year is upon us and it’s time again for our 2022 predictions for the future in technology post.  You will be surprised by the insights shared around what we might see during the upcoming year!  Enjoy!

Digital Experience Monitoring Provides the Best Visibility into Your Users’ Satisfaction

Jason E. Smith, VP of Alliances and Product Marketing, Liquidware  We have seen my prediction from last year – Organizations will continue moving their desktops and workspaces to the Cloud to enable their workforce to work from home – certainly become a reality, and my prediction for 2022 builds upon this. 

With more organizations accepting that a Work from Anywhere (WFx) approach for their teams equates to not only employee satisfaction, but also employee acquisition and retention, how does this approach impact productivity? My prediction for 2022 is that organizations will look to Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) solutions to provide the answers to these key questions:

• Are their users connected?
• Are their users operational?
• What is the quality of the overall user experience?
• Are their users productive?

Ensuring your workforce is having the best possible end-user experience is paramount in ensuring employee satisfaction. A DEM solution is an essential tool in your IT armory, and I believe will become more so in 2022 as WFx becomes more prevalent.

User-centric paradigm shift across the enterprise and healthcare

John Grant, Director Product Marketing, Goliath Technologies We believe that in 2022, especially in healthcare, there will be an acute focus on objectively understanding the employee and clinician experience using specialized software that measures user experience from the users’ perspective, and not basing it on IT element performance or subjective feedback.

It is no secret that the IT marketplace is focused on the use and maturity of the cloud and application/desktop virtualization platforms being used to deliver remote workforces with expanded access to business-critical workloads. Over the last 24 months, these often-evangelized transformative technology trends have become imperatives for the enterprise to survive and provide basic business continuity and compliance. However, this disruptive transformation is now forcing enterprise IT to focus on rapidly evolving their operational processes and tooling in a markedly more material way, because the simple truth is that mobility is the new normal, and remote employees must be able to effectively access workloads. This is ushering in a fundamental paradigm shift for IT Operations: from analyzing the health of individual IT elements, to an emphasis on objectively measuring the actual user experience from the users’ perspective.

Historically, the approach has been to infer the user experience from the performance of the IT individual infrastructure. For example, in healthcare, where organizations have spent wildly in the last decade to deploy Electronic Health Records, they struggle mightily with reliability, stability, performance and availability of those applications. A principal measure of how well they are performing in these areas is to rely on highly subjective feedback such as surveys and tickets. This occurs in the enterprise market as well. Of course, the difference is that in healthcare, patient care and safety is at risk.

The Increasingly “Work from Anywhere” Future is Littered with Security Concerns

Andy Syrewicze, Technical Evangelist, Hornetsecurity, As 2021 concluded, and as system admins everywhere are scrambling to patch a multitude of Log4J vulnerabilities it’s more evident than ever that security will continue to stay top of mind in the coming years. With the growing adoption of platforms like M365 and other distributed cloud services new avenues of attack are opening every day, affecting both remote workforces, and cloud services themselves.

To combat this, organizations will need to adopt a new hardened security posture using best-of-class tools, a Zero-Trust strategy, and employ “actual” humans for proper monitoring and management. Finally, businesses will need to plan on training end users to identify attacks like Phishing. You’re only as protected as your least-experienced end-user, and IT teams that work to secure the entire business end-to-end (including the human factor) will be all the more protected in the coming year.

Zero Trust security will become a requirement for remote & hybrid work platforms

Robb Henshaw, CMO at Cameyo While Log4j garnered a lot of attention at the end of 2021, it was just the latest in a long string of security issues that have targeted cloud platforms often used in remote & hybrid work over the past 18 months. In the first 6 months of 2021 alone ransomware hit an all-time global high by increasing 151% over 2020’s already-elevated levels (source: ThreatPost). This highlights that, while most orgs have clearly taken the adoption of remote & hybrid work seriously, this has often been done at the expense of their security posture/attack surface.

While Zero Trust security has been a buzzword for quite some time, the dramatic increase in ransomware and zero day exploits in the past 18 months will be the tipping point for the adoption of Zero Trust technologies. In 2022 we will see Zero Trust security as a requirement in RFPs as organizations prioritize technologies that bridge the gap between enabling productive hybrid work AND fortifying the organization’s security, regardless of where their people are located or what devices they’re working on.

A perfect storm is brewing again in IT

John Worthington, Customer Success Director at eG Innovations The multi-tiered infrastructures that emerged two decades ago now include virtualized, cloud-based and micro services architectures and have dramatically increased the technical complexity of assuring end-to-end digital performance. In addition, traditional ITSM practice frameworks have also created so much complexity that many enterprises have not been able to establish an effective and standardized service management system that can easily adapt to localized requirements.

The digital experience is driving the creation of experience level agreements, IT operations is frantically attempting to automate operations and application development continues its attempts to modernize the application portfolio. The digital workspace further complicates an already complicated mess. But applying technologies such as AIOps and workflow automation to a fragmented monitoring portfolio and the absence of a simple, well defined process model for ITSM practice frameworks are just of few parts of this digital tornado.

We still have shortages of qualified technical staff, cultural hurdles and ongoing challenges defining (and re-defining) IT services.

There will continue to be new buzzwords in 2022, but many of the challenges are not new. Balancing the desire to accelerate transformation with the reality of an organizations’ capacity for change and maintaining the operational discipline to establish (ore re-establish) a simplified process model for service management will be key to long term success.

Unifying service management requires both a process and a services perspective of business capabilities. Establishing a simple service management system and optimization of the monitoring portfolio may be key to weathering the coming storm.

2022 predictions for the future in technology, that’s a wrap!