Recently IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity, released the results of a survey about the most important technologies in the coming year. In that survey they asked 350 CIOs and CTOs in the US, UK, China, India, and Brazil about the impact of Covid-19 on technology adoption and cybersecurity. Their answers are shedding some light on how the world will change in 2021.
The global pandemic has had and continues to have, a heavy impact on the world. The depth of that impact may not be completely understood for years to come but in the meantime companies all over the world are doing their best to adapt to the situation at hand. One of the ways companies are adapting to the situation is by adopting and accelerating new technology to help them prepare for the challenges brought on by Covid-19.
The IEEE survey asked CTOs and CIOs about the more important technologies to adopt in the upcoming year and their answers were enlightening. Among their top answers were accelerated adoption of cloud computing, 5G, as well as AI and machine learning. Other answers included the internet of things, augmented/virtual reality, and video conferencing.
Technology Adoption, Acceleration and Disaster Preparedness due to COVID-19
In addition to accelerating the adoption of certain technologies companies are also preparing themselves for potential large-scale issues like data breaches and natural disasters. According to the survey, 92% consider themselves better prepared and more than half agree that Covid-19 was responsible for motivating the change. In addition to that preparedness, many companies have had to increase their cybersecurity to help compensate for the existence of a mobile workforce, employees using personal devices, and to ensure that workplace data remains secure. It seems that in this category there is still work to be done because only a third of those surveyed can track and manage 26-50% of the devices connected to their business and about a fifth can handle 51-75%.
Cybersecurity and preparing for the worst
As the pandemic continues, we can only guess at its overall impact. For now, we will all have to move forward with the information we have and hope that the decisions we are making are for the best.
