Top tech trends for 2022

Info-Tech Research Group has revealed its annual top tech trends insights for the coming year, based on insights from 475 IT professionals who participated in an industry survey, exploring how ripple effects from the pandemic will impact the evolving digital economy in 2022.

The survey was fielded from August 2021 to September 2021 and included similar questions asked in previous reports for a holistic, year-over-year analysis. The underlying metrics for the 2022 report are diverse, with representation from 14 countries and regions and 16 Industries, including government, manufacturing, education, healthcare, financial services, construction, and retail.

The findings, coupled with exclusive analyst research and expert perspectives, indicate what technology strategies will be the highest priority for technology teams.

Five tech trends identified for 2022

• Hybrid collaboration – IT leaders will have an opportunity to lead hybrid work by facilitating collaboration between virtual and onsite employees for a digital employee experience that is flexible, contextual, and free from the friction of current hybrid operating models.
• Battle against ransomware – Security strategies will need to adapt to the new caliber of ransomware threats to avoid operational disruption and reputational damage.
• Carbon metrics in Energy 4.0 – IT is well-positioned to support conscious decisions about how technology choices impact carbon emissions and implement effective tracking of emissions across the entire enterprise.
• Intangible value creation – Blockchain technology poses a new technological frontier that enables peer-to-peer exchange. Decentralized technologies will propel the digital economy and redefine how central banks distribute currency, and how platforms track provenance for scarce digital assets.
• Automation as a Service – APIs will accelerate innovation by unlocking marketplaces of ready-to-use solutions to solve business problems and automating manual tasks to make more time for creativity.

“It’s clear that we’re not going to rebound to what business was like before the pandemic. Deterred from gathering in physical spaces, people have shifted much of their spending and activities to an online context. That’s why we’ve seen digital transformation accelerated over the last 20 months as companies either scramble to adapt to shifting customer expectations or get left behind,” says Brian Jackson, Research Director for the CIO space at Info-Tech.

“For leaders of IT departments, the opportunity is to help businesses grow revenue by enabling that digital transformation. Info-Tech’s 2022 Tech Trends Report focuses on the IT capabilities that will have the most impact in that regard, demonstrating use cases for new technologies that will help advance the maturity of IT in the coming year.”

Top research takeaways

• Survey respondents revealed that only 18% of employees want to return to the office while 70% of employers want their staff back onsite. In 2022, it is believed that 79% of organizations will have a mix of employees in the office and remote, with 35% indicating that role type will be a determining factor in the feasibility of a hybrid model.
• 62% of IT professionals say they are more concerned about being a victim of ransomware than they were one year ago, and 42% feel employees must do much more to help defend against ransomware.
• 2022 will see new laws from governments influencing an organization’s decision to reduce emissions. 68% of organizations say they have a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The most popular approaches cited included retiring older IT equipment or using renewable energy sources.
• With the shift to remote work and the success of digital services due to COVID-19, 69% of IT practitioners say digital transformation has been a high priority for their organization during the pandemic and indicate that it will remain a priority moving forward, with one-third of IT respondents saying their organizations were “extremely focused” on this shift.