Page 23 - EngineerIt January 2021

ICT INSIGHT

Trend 2: Driving experience (and safety) through sensors

Long used for quality assurance and tracking environmental changes, the importance
of sensors for both personal and workforce health, safety and wellbeing will take
centre stage - patch-like sensors to track health and well-being; sports sensors to
observe concussion; fatigue sensors to monitor alertness in ruggedised
environments. For those returning to the workplace, data-based insights delivered by
sensors will help provide a safer, healthier and more productive environment.
Combined with Wi-Fi, location technologies and collaboration platforms like Webex,
they will identify under-utilised or overcrowded spaces, while monitoring room
temperature, humidity, air quality and light. According to the Cisco Global Workforce
Study, 96% of companies can provide better work environments with intelligent
workplace technology.

Trend 3: Keys to the future: app-enabled agility and resilience
Garsen Naidu, Cisco GM
In the early months of the pandemic, organisations had to adapt quickly to meet highly Sub-Saharan Africa.
unpredictable changes. Cloud was the critical enabler of this new agility. For many
organisations, it was the only way to gain the capabilities that enabled them to meet
the rapidly shifting demands of their customers and employees, regardless of costs. Trusted Access Report, 80% of
Ten months later, the applications at the heart of our businesses are highly distributed. mobile devices used for work have
Our workforces are more mobile than ever before and the demands on our systems biometrics configured, up 12% in the
are unprecedented. past five years.
Looking ahead, IT teams will need even greater agility. By using observability
solutions, teams can shift from monitoring everything to monitoring the data and Trend 6: Consumption models
insights that matter. And as they continue to scale their ongoing transformations, for the tech you actually need
insights and automation will be essential to future growth, competitiveness and
resilience. According to Cisco 2021 CIO and ITDM Trends Pulse, 75% of CIOs and IT Organisations have long invested in
decision makers want to be able to utilise business insights better. one-size-fits-all tech solutions. That
meant paying for features users might
Trend 4: From customer experience to brand excitement never actually demand. Today, software
as a service enables organisations to
The explosive growth of mobile and smart devices has transformed our very way of life. pay for the features and capabilities they
Today, mobile apps are available for everything from shopping and banking to learning currently need, with the option to scale
and wellbeing. More recently, they have become essential tools for tracking contacts other services with great speed and
during the pandemic. Mobile apps also enable both public and private-sector agility, when needed. Consumption
organisations to connect with users in ways that were unimaginable just a few years models will continue to shift, especially
ago. And as we have seen, most business processes also run on applications. The as more and more features and
most advanced applications enable even more personal relationships, along with capabilities are available via software,
instantaneous responses. That demands the ability to turn masses of real-time whether on site or in the cloud. The
information from the network into actionable insights. And to do it fast. Armed with such flexibility and cost savings that pay-as-
capabilities, companies can respond to a customer even before they report an issue. you-consume models provide are simply
It’s this combination of immersive, intelligence-based personalisation and experience too good to resist. This shift to pay-as-
that will transform baseline customer satisfaction into deep customer engagement, you-consume spending gives
excitement and loyalty. organisations more flexibility and cost
Seventy one percent of CIOs and IT decision makers agreed that customer predictability to manage their IT spend —
experience is about more than just satisfaction—it’s about delighting the customer. something that 85% of CIOs and IT
decision makers agreed is important to
Trend 5: Identity and a passwordless future their business (43% called it very
important) in Cisco’s 2021 CIO and IT
Mobility, distributed work, and the growing use of cloud solutions have provided huge Decision Makers Trends Pulse. n
benefits in scalability and cost. But with a greatly expanded security perimeter, new
challenges arise. The zero-trust methodology was developed to address these
challenges. Stolen or lost credentials continue to be the common cause of breach, a Wi-Fi 6 is the next generation standard
situation that has been exacerbated with the massive shift to remote work. Identity is in WiFi technology. Wi-Fi 6, also known
now truly the new perimeter. Platforms, industry groups and security providers are as “AX WiFi" or "802.11ax WiFi” builds
working towards a password-free future as enabling technologies such as biometrics and improves on the current 802.11ac
will soon be ubiquitous for both consumers and enterprises. Organisations need to WiFi standard. Wi-Fi 6 was originally
begin preparing for this inevitable shift, where users no longer rely on a traditional built in response to the growing
password as their primary method of proving who they are. According to 2020 Duo number of devices in the world. n

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