Gartner: The Top Strategic Technology Trends For 2022

Imperatives for accelerated digital transformation and growth

Gartner strategic technology trends
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Gartner forecasts the most significant strategic technology trends to accelerate digital transformation in 2022. These trends to act as force multipliers of digital business and innovation over the next 3 to 5 years. “Enterprises that adopt and plan for these technology trends will create long-term roadmaps for sustainable business growth.”

What are the 2022 strategic technology trends according to Gartner and why are they important to CIOs and technology executives?

  • Data Fabric
  • Cybersecurity Mesh
  • Privacy Enhancing Computation
  • Cloud native platforms
  • Composable applications
  • Decision Intelligence
  • Hyperautomation
  • AI Engineering
  • Distributable Enterprises
  • Total Experience
  • Autonomic Systems
  • Generative AI

Trend 1: Data Fabric as a strategic technology can reduce data management efforts by up to 70%

Data Fabric tops the list of Gartner strategic technology trends in 2022. It provides a flexible, resilient integration of data sources across platforms and business users, making data available everywhere it’s needed regardless where the data lives.

Deploying analytics to learn and actively recommend where data should be used and changed, Data Fabric can reduce data management efforts by up to 70%.

Gartner Strategic Technology Trends
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Trend 2: As security threats increase, Cyber Security Mesh gains prominence as a strategic technology trend in 2022.

Gartner defines Cybersecurity mesh as a flexible, composable architecture that integrates widely distributed and disparate security services. This strategic technology enables best-of-breed, stand-alone security solutions to work together to improve overall security while moving control points closer to the assets they’re designed to protect.

Cyber security mesh as a growing strategic technology trend can quickly and reliably verify identity, context and policy adherence across cloud and noncloud environments.

Also Read: 40% of Boards Will Have a Dedicated Cybersecurity Committee by 2025

Trend 3: Privacy-Enhancing Computation 

Privacy-enhancing computation secures the processing of personal data in untrusted environments — which is increasingly critical due to evolving privacy and data protection laws as well as growing consumer concerns.

This utilizes a variety of privacy-protection techniques to allow value to be extracted from data while still meeting compliance requirements.

Trend 4: Cloud-Native Platforms 

Gartner forecasts non-cloud as the new legacy. As digital transformation accelerates, cloud is becoming pervasive.

Cloud-native platforms are technologies that allow you to build new application architectures that are resilient, elastic and agile — enabling you to respond to rapid digital change.

This strategic tech trend improves on the traditional lift-and-shift approach to cloud, which fails to take advantage of the benefits of cloud and adds complexity to maintenance. 

Read more: Why Cloud is the Centrepiece of New Digital Experiences

Trend 5: Composable Applications

Composable applications are built from business-centric modular components.

Composable applications make it easier to use and reuse code, accelerating the time to market for new software solutions and releasing enterprise value.

Strategic Technology Trend 6: Decision Intelligence 

Gartner lists Decision intelligence is one of the top data and analytics trends.

A practical approach to improve organizational decision making, It models each decision as a set of processes, using intelligence and analytics to inform, learn from and refine decisions.

This critical technology trend can can support and enhance human decision making and, potentially, automate it through the use of augmented analytics, simulations and AI.

Also read: The Exciting Future of Data & Analytics

Trend 7: Hyperautomation

Hyperautomation is a disciplined, business-driven approach to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible.

Hyperautomation enables scalability, remote operation and business model disruption.

AI Projects in Australia - Autonomous mining
Autonomous Trucks – Image Courtesy: Fortesque

Trend 8: AI Engineering

AI engineering automates updates to data, models and applications to streamline AI delivery.
Combined with strong AI governance, AI engineering will operationalize the delivery of AI to ensure its ongoing business value.

Read more: AI in Australia – The Roadmap and Imperative

Trend 9: Distributed Enterprises

Distributed enterprises reflect a digital-first, remote-first business model to improve employee experiences, digitalize consumer and partner touchpoints, and build out product experiences.

Distributed enterprises better serve the needs of remote employees and consumers, who are fueling demand for virtual services and hybrid workplaces.

Trend 10: Total Experience

Total experience is a business strategy that integrates employee experience, customer experience, user experience and multiexperience across multiple touchpoints to accelerate growth.

Total experience can drive greater customer and employee confidence, satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy through holistic management of stakeholder experiences.

AI in Australia
Image Courtesy: Ricardo Gomez | Unsplash

Trend 11: Autonomic Systems is a growing strategic technology trend in 2022 as AI goes mainstream

Autonomic systems are self-managed physical or software systems that learn from their environments and dynamically modify their own algorithms in real time to optimize their behavior in complex ecosystems.

Autonomic systems create an agile set of technology capabilities that are able to support new requirements and situations, optimize performance and defend against attacks without human intervention.

Read more: The Key Drivers Behind Rising AI Investment in Australia 

Trend 12: Generative AI

Generative AI learns about artifacts from data, and generates innovative new creations that are similar to the original but doesn’t repeat it.

This has the potential to create new forms of creative content, such as video, and accelerate R&D cycles in fields ranging from medicine to product creation.

Read more: The Top AI Projects in Australia 

How will the Gartner strategic technology trends impact the business in 2022? 

Each strategic technology trend delivers one of three main outcomes: Engineering Trust, Sculpting Change and Accelerating Growth.

By capitalising on strategic technology trends, CIO’s can unleash force multipliers that could win business and increase market share.

Gartner notes, these trends together help maximise value creation and digital capabilities.

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