The information technology (IT) industry is a $5B industry that plays a critical role in almost all sectors, including healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, education, and energy. As the US continues to lead in technology innovation, information technology is quickly becoming the backbone of both national security and economic growth.
Smoothstack has successfully kickstarted hundreds of IT careers for individuals across the US through their modern-day IT apprenticeship program. Their success is attributable in large part to Smoothstack’s high-quality employee training, rigorous hiring process, and adaptability to ever-changing industry needs. The IT landscape changes quickly, and paramount to providing quality upskilling is not only the ability to adapt quickly, but to also identify areas in which upcoming trends will shape IT. Here, Smoothstack reviews the latest IT trends of 2021 and how they will impact the technology industry.
Focus on Privacy
Over the past two years, the IT sector has experienced a never-seen-before emphasis on global data protection. In 2020, the number of remote workers tripled due to COVID-19 and the need to connect the workforce within a virtual environment. As a result, companies are seeking better solutions to ensure company data remains secure within this new framework. The IT community has responded with both novel privacy-enhancing computation and cybersecurity mesh. Privacy-enhancing computation helps secure sensitive data, protecting it during processing. Essentially, this allows for collaboration without the sharing of sensitive data. Cybersecurity mesh allows business to decouple policy decision-making from policy enforcement and effectively establishes security perimeters around individual parameters rather than securing the organization as a whole. This creates a modular security architecture that is more manageable and more responsive to outside threats.
Intelligent Composable Business
One of the most talked-about trends of 2021 is intelligent composable business. This new concept leverages business capabilities and applications into interchangeable building blocks. Composable business is based on four main principles: speed through discovery, agility through modularity, leadership through orchestration, and resilience through autonomy. Intelligent composable business will not only accelerate digital business progress but will help businesses adapt to economic changes more quickly.
AI MLOps
Although MLOps or “Machine Learning Operations” is not a recent technological innovation, COVID-19 has put a new focus on MLOps and their application. No one can deny the massive impact COVID-19 has had on the global workforce; with new changes to operational workflow, traffic patterns, and inventory management, many AI operations began to react unexpectedly and Drift. Drifting takes place when AI receives data that it was not taught to react to. One of the main functions of MLOps is to detect anomalies in ML model development and alert IT teams so they may fix the issue and make improvements.
