Gartner, IDC, Forrester & Co.: The 2020 IT Trends

Artificial intelligence (AI) is developing into a paradigm which will revolutionise all the other “trends” to a greater or lesser degree in 2020 and beyond, says Heiko Henkes, Director Research Lead Digital Transformation at ISG Research, in CIO Magazine. Because AI has an impact on practically every other issue, the number of application scenarios is increasing rapidly.

Other top issues are once again security and 5G as well as cloud and edge computing, under the big umbrella of the “Internet of Things” (IoT). The cross-technology digitisation of the whole company and its staff is top of the CIO agenda again this year.

IT security
Forrester’s prediction that IT security will assume new dimensions is hardly surprising, since the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) emphasised in its latest status report that the quality of cyber attacks has increased further and the threat level remains high.

5G
As for the 5G mobile telecommunications standard, many analysts anticipate major changes in the coming years. For example, Gartner forecasts a rise in investment of just under 90 percent to around 4.2 billion US dollars worldwide.

Cloud
On the other hand, cloud computing is already mainstream, says trade journalist Harald Weiß in ComputerWeekly. According to Gartner the cloud has now become established; public cloud services this year are again growing by over 15 percent to around 250 billion US dollars worldwide.

According to Nucleus Research the trend is towards the multi-cloud. IDC also is also talking of 70 percent of IT organisations implementing multi-cloud as cornerstones of their strategy in three to four years’ time.

IoT and Edge
When one looks at the strong growth of IoT, the accompanying increase in edge computing is also clear. Edge computing is becoming a dominant factor in almost every industry and application. According to Gartner complex edge devices such as robots, drones, autonomous vehicles and operating systems will accelerate this change.

The point of departure for Edge and IoT is also a rapidly rising number of sensors and other end-points. And IoT is bringing edge computing further into focus for cost reasons as well, according to ISG Research. At the moment it is estimated that less than five percent of the data arising in the production environment are evaluated. Yet even now it is often too expensive to store these data in the public cloud. This is where edge computing comes into play, with the data being analysed where they originate.

Companies can only successfully implement the current IT megatrends of IoT, edge computing, hybrid-cloud and IT security if they are built on the right IT infrastructure. Most companies are undergoing a transformation process due to market pressure and have initiated digitisation processes.  In doing so, however, they often forget to provide for the appropriately scalable foundations. “For successful digitisation can only work with the matching IT infrastructure on which companies base their business models,” explained Ralf Klotzbücher, VP Sales and Marketing Europe at Datwyler.