By 2025 workforce most likely to consist of humans and bots

The workforce, workplace, and the technologies that support them will be so different by 2025 that enterprises need to provide global access and ensure continuous uptime now. That’s only one of several conclusions arising from OneLogin’s survey of 100 CIOs of companies with at least 5,000 employees.

The majority of the surveyed CIOs, based across the U.S., EMEA, and Asia-Pacific regions agreed that the volume, complexity, and pace of business are accelerating far faster than in this decade. Because of that, they urge a strong focus on developing solutions to alleviate the growing access bottleneck created by the convergence of trends including ubiquitous connectivity, automation at massive scale, infinite scalability, and artificial intelligence.

A near-unanimous 97 percent of the respondents said they believe technology will grow in sophistication and complexity in the next six years and that the workforce will be dispersed across all geographies and time zones. Additionally:

• 94 percent agreed the 2025 workforce will consist of both human resources and bots.
• 93 percent said the pace of business will continue to accelerate through 2025.
• 89 percent agree that high-performing businesses of the future will be required to leverage machine learning and AI to predict and rapidly meet the needs of their customers.
• 59 percent anticipated the pace of business will evolve to at least twice today’s rate

The CIOs recognized that work now occurs anywhere at any time, with 58 percent agreeing that remote work will increase significantly over the next six years. In fact, 43 percent of employees say they work remotely at least part-time, and 69 percent of professionals say workplace flexibility is a critical issue when evaluating potential employers.

Unified Access Management, the study showed, lies at the heart of the dynamic marketplace. It provides a platform which enables the centralized management of all users, devices, and apps to provide simple and secure access in a system that is intuitive to use for everyone from the end-user to the system admin.

“Imagine the billions of handshakes and interactions with a workforce spread around the world, requiring access to hundreds of SaaS and on-premise apps. This is where the bottlenecks are going to occur. Finding a solution will be the greatest challenge,” OneLogin Chief Product Officer Venkat Sathyamurthy said. “And this challenge is not just because of new cloud technologies. Industry research continues to confirm that organizations will operate in hybrid environments that include on-premise technologies as well. Managing both sides are key to business success.”

CIOs largely agreed, as 85 percent of those polled said that poor access management could exacerbate that bottleneck. “In the evolving digital economy, the pace of business is critical,” Sathyamurthy said. “The challenge that we’ll face in the coming years belongs to the emerging commercial ecosystem we call the ‘Dynamic Marketplace.’ This is where the developments across workforce, workplace, and technology interact. There must be a way to manage access in the dynamic marketplace, or we’ll fail to realize the benefits it offers.”

“Until recently, most access scenarios involved internal employees working primarily from dedicated desktop computers on the corporate network,” said Garrett Bekker, Principal Security Analyst, 451 Research. “However, modern firms will face considerable changes in the coming years and the approaches to access control will need to evolve accordingly. For example, the user community has expanded, consisting of employees, partners, contractors, consultants, customers, and, increasingly, ‘non-humans’ like bots. Further, ‘human’ users are no longer confined to their desks, but increasingly work from a variety of locations, including home offices or coffee shops, and are accessing resources that can be located virtually anywhere. Access control solutions that fail take this diversity into account will be found lacking.”