2020 Technology Trends: Distributed Cloud and Resilient Delivery

Oct. 21, 2020, 3:36 p.m.

TL;DR

At the ongoing virtual Gartner IT Symposium/ Xpo Americas, Gartner Inc. announced the top strategic technology trends for 2021. The main areas that formed the theme for this year’s technology trends were people centricity, location independence, and resilient delivery.

Top Cloud and Distributed Systems Technology Trends for 2020

Key Facts

1
Gartner predicts that intelligent composable business models will be adopted by businesses to speed up decision-making by machines fueled by large amounts of data.
2
According to Gartner, at least 50% of the world’s population will be subject to at least one IoB (Internet of Behavior) programs by the end of 2025.
3
Data privacy is a huge priority for all organizations, and by 2025, half of all the large organizations in the world will be implementing privacy-enhancing computation for data processing in untrusted environments.
4
40% of all organizations would have applied anywhere operations to blend physical and virtual customer and employee experiences by 2023.
5
The COVID19 pandemic has exponentially increased the requirement for hyper-automation. Nearly 70% of all commercial organizations have undertaken hundreds of automation initiatives as a response to the global pandemic.

Details

The top technology trends for 2020 are centered around different themes including people centricity, location independence, and resilient delivery.

The global pandemic has changed how people work and interact with organizations. With nations imposing lockdowns and more and more people working from home, the need for digitalized processes is much more now than ever before. Location independence is also important as employees, customers, and organizational ecosystems are no longer what they used to be. Organizations need resilience to adapt to all types of disruptions that the pandemic situation may present. These technology trends do not work independently of each other but rather build on and reinforce one another.

More and more companies are now opting for cloud technologies. The distributed cloud is another top technology trend of 2020. It provides public cloud options to different physical locations. Customers benefit from public cloud options as they no longer need to pay for costly private cloud solutions.

Other surveys like the 2019 CNCF Survey show that containers and Kubernetes have swiftly emerged as the preferred platform of choice for cloud-native and distributed cloud systems. This choice is motivated by the operational resiliency of containerized applications running on Kubernetes. This leads us to believe that both trends (distributed cloud and resilient delivery) will be predominantly reflected in an increase of Kubernetes usage during 2020.

Gartner VP, Brian Burke, states, in a press release, that the need for operational resiliency across enterprise functions has never been greater.

In line with location independence, anywhere operations refer to an IT operating model that can support customers and employees everywhere. It also manages the deployment of business services across distributed infrastructure. Anywhere operations rely on the model ‘digital first, remote first.’

The need for operational resiliency across enterprise functions has never been greater. CIOs are striving to adapt to changing conditions to compose future business. This requires the organizational plasticity to form and reform dynamically. Gartner's top strategic technology trends for 2021 enable that plasticity.
Brian Burke
Research VP, Gartner