It’s no secret that 2020 was unprecedented in many ways, whether we’re referring to the pandemic, the numerous security breaches worldwide, or the transformation that many people and businesses have had to undergo. It is evident that businesses need to stay on top of trends and cutting-edge tech in order to not only survive but thrive in the present market.

2020 was a significant year for accelerated digital change and adoption. Take remote work for example. Many new creative solutions emerged to solve a wide array of problems that companies had not encountered before. But, regardless of your business’ industry, it is critical to analyze tendencies across all industries and stay aware of the changing landscape. In this article, I would be outlining some of these key tech trends for 2021.

Data Engineering: The Security Concern

Data engineering will continue to grow, thanks to its ability to help drive important business decisions. Software that’s capable of performing calculations and analysis of data in real-time will be sought-after. These software are able to build data analytics quickly, ultimately saving both time and money for any business making use of them. But with big changes in data engineering, comes big responsibility like maintaining data safely, securely, and privately. With last year’s rush to become digital, there has never been more consumer data available and vulnerable. As the demand for digitization increases, the incentive and potential reward for attacks also increase. Along with GDPR, CCPA, CASL, and other region-specific regulations, the treatment and storage of data will be more important than ever.

Machine Learning: Further Differentiation

Machine Learning (ML) has evolved throughout the years and presented groundbreaking applications for the real world. Yet the capabilities presented in scientific papers are far ahead of industry. It is the fastest-growing and most popular data-driven technology in the world right now. Statistics show that 9 in 10 leading businesses have ongoing investments in AI. The impact of ML in software development has been considerable in terms of expediting an outcome, enabling more informed decision-making, and delivering more relevant and meaningful customer experiences. Public access to ML APIs such as GPT-3 will allow businesses to further differentiate for their own applications.

Low-code Development: New State of Evolution

Gartner predicts that by 2024, more than 65% of application development activity will be directed by low-code development. This technology is a set of tools that are used to simplify building entire websites with a minimal amount of coding required. Webflow in particular follows a structured approach for elements on the page, providing familiarity for developers and a system for non-developers alike to follow. While Low-code Development has been around since web 1.0, companies like Webflow have taken it to a new level of evolution. With a continued blending of roles, in this case, UI designer and UI developer, we will see more static sites and marketing websites launched with low-code platforms in 2021 in a digital revolution that allows teams to continue to remove a dependency on IT staff when unnecessary.

Cross-Platform Mobile: The Framework Convergence

iOS and Android have enabled several cross-platform frameworks such as React-Native, Flutter, Xamarin, Kotlin-Native to evolve over the years, allowing developers to use one codebase with minimal variations across the two operating systems. With the challenges of managing and maintaining multiple codebases with straight native development, I like to think of cross-platform native mobile as the end state. With companies like Microsoft picking up React Native in favour of their own framework, Xamarin, we’re seeing a clear convergence in the industry towards React Native.

DevSecOps: Shift Security Left

With all the security breaches that happened in the previous year, it’s more crucial than ever for security to be embedded into development practices. DevOps is a methodology that aims at shortening the delivery time of software, whereas SecOps is a procedure through which security is prioritized early in development. DevSecOps is an attempt at balancing the two objectives and maximizing them. In recent years, consumers have become sensitive to giving out their personal information, which constitutes valuable data for businesses. By prioritizing security without negatively impacting their efficiency, businesses can improve their reputation and create a relationship of trust with consumers. By training developers and familiarizing them with standards like OWASP ASVS, teams can be more mindful about security earlier into their pipeline.

Internet of Things: Data Enablement

IoT has come a long way in recent years, nearly everything is connected. But, nothing accelerated the adoption more than people being stuck indoors during the pandemic. Research indicates that there will be more than 27.1 billion devices connected to the internet in 2021, which can be translated to roughly 3.5 devices per person. In addition, the rise of smart city solutions is rolling out IoT projects recently. When these groundbreaking initiatives continue to produce vast volumes of data, developments in 5G and edge computing can push data collection to the next level.

Kubernetes: The Container Takeover

Kubernetes is expanding the foundation of containers and is now used by over half the organizations that use containers in both self-managed and cloud providers (Datadog). Kubernetes is set to continue to ride the tide of increased adoption with container-based organizations in 2021 with its expansion into new frontiers such as 5G infrastructure, orchestrating VMs and serverless applications. Kubernetes and container technology more broadly, will continue to make analytics technology and data portable across public cloud and between those clouds and customer data centers.

Conclusion

We are headed into an interesting year and are sure to see exciting new products leveraging these trends. The competition will be tough, requiring companies to stay relevant in their industries by adopting emerging trends and technologies. This becomes even clearer when considering the current pandemic climate, which has shown the importance of being agile to quickly adapt to an unstable market. Companies will be able to increase revenues by keeping their customers stimulated and enhancing their overall experience.

Being aware of these technologies and trends is definitely essential for teams, but the correct implementation is always challenging and not so easy. Enterprises can either spend their time and efforts on choosing, integrating, and testing a relevant technology to build their own platform, or they can find a partner that delivers a solution that offers a combination of flexibility and simplicity of use to meet the requirements of their business.

If you're looking to leverage digital technologies to help your business innovate, evolve, and grow, Quantum Mob and our dedicated experts can help you out with that. At Quantum Mob, we create custom-tailored solutions that empower our partners to succeed and become digital-first.

Get in touch with us today and let's discuss how we can help you build innovative software solutions for your business. Write to us at hello@qmo.io.