Key Technologies and Trends to impact 2022

The year 2021 was an unusually a different year. It changed the world and impacted everyone. Businesses around the globe faced situations they had never witnessed earlier. As we are approaching 2022, it's important that organizations remain cognizant of emerging trends.

 
India is expected to be a 10 trillion dollar economy in a few years. Banking & fintech are going to play a big role in achieving this. Multiple fintech ventures have taken the opportunity in 2020 to launch and implement various innovations for consumer growth. This in turn has led to a stronger partnership between the banking ecosystem and the Fintechs.

 
New technologies give rise to innovative business models and products by simplifying the mechanics of data-sharing across and between organizations. We live in an era of everything connected and the consumer marketplace is no exception. Businesses are expected to not just meet the needs of customers, but anticipate and exceed them.

 
Having a robust marketing strategy isn’t enough anymore. As consumer expectations change, competition becomes more advanced, and data gets more detailed. The Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are under immense pressure to modernize their approach to marketing. This has added complexity to their roles and placed them at the heart of organizational success. There is a mind-set of digital-first, using AI to create stronger, more authentic interactions with customers, and effectively using technologies to capitalize data for insights-driven results.

 
Cybersecurity is everyone's business
More than 90 percent of IT vulnerabilities are application-based rather than network-based, and these vulnerabilities can grow exponentially complicated on a widespread multi-cloud network. Individuals, businesses, and governments must take a proactive approach to cybersecurity and have appropriate solutions in place to stay ahead of threats.

 
Ransomware and the cloud are the big stories that impacted backup and storage this year. Backup and data protection looks to have been given heightened prominence by the huge rise in ransomware attacks this year.

 
As organizations struggle with security breaches, cyber AI can be a force multiplier, enabling security teams not only to respond faster than cyberattackers, but also to anticipate these moves and act in advance. Organizations’ attack surfaces are exponentially expanding. Meanwhile, the cost of cybercrime continues to climb; it’s expected to touch US$7 trillion by the end of 2021 and grow to US$10.5 trillion by 2025.

Attackers will set their eyes on countries’ critical digital infrastructure
Cyberattacks on essential infrastructure, with confidential and lucrative data worldwide, are on rise. These attacks have revealed that the implementation of cybersecurity protocols is significantly slower than the rate of digitalization across countries. With hackers aiming to dent the critical infrastructure, we need to fastrack improved global policies and regulatory collaboration. Governments and businesses must encourage the creation of safeguards against complex threats, particularly those that target critical infrastructure through supply chain gaps. Time-strapped security teams will benefit from technologies like behavioral analytics and SOAR.

The biggest source of spamming and malware attacks is through social media and Digital marketing that are becoming a crowded sector, leading to increased spending in hopes of reaching customers. When faced with such a keenly competitive landscape, AI-powered marketing offers the ability to make a more meaningful impression on your customers with limited exposure they may have to a brand’s message, allowing them to forge deeper bonds and excel in the marketplace.
 

Increase in network-connected devices, 5G, IoT, Wi-Fi 6, and other networking advances are driving an increase in network-connected devices. When seeking a soft attack vector, cybercriminals will be able to choose from a growing number of network-connected physical assets—29.3 billion by 2023, according to an estimate.
 

Going forward, Hybrid work is here to stay, and IT managers must balance PC management that not only meet security requirements but also provide employees with resources to get work done without inconvenience. For many workers, remote work is expected to remain the rule, not the exception, providing cybercriminals with many new opportunities.
 

The API economy will usher in a new era of digital frauds and exploits
With the rise of open-banking and hyper growth of Fintech, poor programming or security misconfigurations at the application interface levels (API) could provide cybercriminals greater opportunities to carry out identity theft, fraud, and unauthorized data collection. Public-private participation through awareness and educational programs would be central to every security strategy. Special focus would be given to groups like the elderly, who may be more susceptible to fraud as new users of digital banking platforms.

Simultaneously, enterprises will need to adopt DevSecOps, which will ensure their infrastructure is tested for security problems before it goes public, allowing their IT teams to plan for any security issues that might appear after deployment. In addition, organizations should implement API security to their inventory and assess the security of external-facing APIs. Monitoring and addressing any anomalous activities within API interactions is also vital.
 

The rising demand of bitcoin will create a well-funded adversary
Cryptocurrency will fuel the rise and evolution of the ransomware industry, with larger attacks on important infrastructure, while calls for its regulation gain traction. Because of its decentralized character, it will be difficult for regulators to track down the perpetrators. As a result, businesses must concentrate on enhancing their cybersecurity posture and determine their level of preparedness for an attack, as well as conducting tabletop exercises to identify any security weaknesses that must be fixed.

Going forward
The security leaders will step up their protections against third-party risks. In security, you always need to be thinking ahead about what might come down the pipeline. The security hiring boom will continue. We know that cybersecurity professionals are a hot commodity across industries, due to more available jobs than trained applicants. In fact, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that employment for information security analysts is projected to grow 33% from 2020-2030. There is a need to hire highly-qualified security professionals throughout 2022. With this the cybersecurity talent pool grows as more professionals choose to enter the field due to increased demand and in many cases, the ability to work from anywhere.
 

The rapid growth of hyperscale computing is poised to continue in 2022, but the pace of that growth will depend upon how well the supply chain can keep pace. To support this, hyperscalers are emerging as a powerful vendor to provide necessary digitization platform capabilities.

Advanced analytics and machine learning platforms can quickly swift through the high volume of data generated by security tools, identify deviations from the norm, evaluate the data from thousands of new connected assets that are flooding the network, and be trained to distinguish between legitimate and malicious files, connections, devices, and users.
 

To adapt to hybrid working environments, more companies will drive to adopt the Zero Trust security model. Conversations around protecting the hybrid workforce from risk will lead security professionals to adopt modern tools and technologies, like multi-factor authentication and the Zero Trust approach to security. Hence, companies need these tools to make sure their employees can get work done as safely as possible from wherever they are - commuting, traveling, or working from home - and that all of their endpoints are secured with continual checks in place.
 

Finally, the year 2022 will be challenging, but it also holds great promise and opportunity. We are already seeing most edge workloads – and even most public cloud edge architectures – shift to software-defined architectures using containerization and assuming standard availability of capacities such as Kubernetes as the dial tone. This combination of modern edge platforms and software-defined edge systems will become the dominant way to build and deploy edge systems in the multi-cloud world.

Fintech industry getting revolutionized

Fintech involves the efficient use of technology to simplify financial processes in a company and build efficiency and automation in transactions, payments processing, etc. However, fintech has further evolved to disrupt our ways of life. It has provided the much-needed convenience with respect to transaction, payments, savings, investments, and insurance. Taking banking to the last mile has been a challenge that many developing nations have been trying to address. With the advent of smartphones and digital transactions, banking needn’t necessarily be done through a branch. Windowless banking is increasingly seeing adoption. Even processes as complicated as a KYC can now be done digitally through video and so can activities such as account opening, transactions, fund transfers, utility bill payments, etc.

Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) is changing the way consumers think about credit. BNPL will come under closer scrutiny from the regulator and banks need to play their part to ensure BNPL is not another way of consumers getting into debt, or the next retail banking scandal. BNPL services are a new form of payment where consumers make purchases and pay them off over a period of time in several installments, often interest-free. While BNPL is typically interest-free, some providers charge high late payment fees. The rise of online shopping and “seamless integration” of BNPL payments with e-commerce platforms has encouraged more purchase decisions to be made.

Collaboration between cybersecurity, cloud and telecommunications providers will help disrupt successful attacks and impose real costs on attackers