SD Times article by Jason English
You may see analyst predictions as meaningless, unless you find yourself choosing between an apple and an orange at a scarcely provisioned continental breakfast buffet. So it goes with the selection of strategies to fulfill an ever-increasing set of digital transformation requirements from a scarce IT budget.
I have here the seeds of Intellyx’s 2021 retrospectives and 2022 predictions. Unlike most other pundits, we try not to state obvious observations as predictions, and we score ourselves on last year’s crop of conjectures.
Predictions from 2021
Appreciating Sir Issac Newton’s theory of gravity, I collected three apples that fell on Jason Bloomberg’s head for his 2021 Intellyx prediction set. Let’s see if they had gravitas.
First off, a dramatic counter-cyberattack against Russia in response to attacks like the SolarWinds hack.
This one didn’t bear fruit–If anything, the rate of exploits and breaches in IT continued apace, crowned in December with the revelation of the widespread log4j vulnerability.
We did see preventative effort and innovation from vendors attempting to ‘shift security left’ in the DevOps lifecycle to make it a developer concern, and open source collaboration toward wiring zero-trust, least privilege fundamentals into the underpinning componentry of microservices-based applications.
Second, the massive Bitcoin-Tether Ponzi collapse didn’t happen yet–but all the conditions needed have intensified tenfold. Times of economic uncertainty and a mistrust of institutions drove celebrity shills and unsuspecting marks to throw down real money for magic blockchain beans.
With over half of crypto exchange activity now circulating through stablecoin shell games, this failure is not a question of if–but when–the rug gets pulled.
Last, the pandemic and recession ending with a bang instead finished with a series of sputters and pops, as an inability to truly shake COVID-19 put a damper on economic relief and constrained global business operations.
But in terms of IT, the wait-and-see period of 2021 gave way to an explosion of innovation and consolidation, especially in cloud-native, edge, and AI technologies, showing no signs of slowing down.
Better still, workers in the digital economy made the greatest gains in 2021, as collaborative lessons, work-from-anywhere capabilities and a serious talent shortage meant many IT employees could afford to job-hop and demand better salaries and flexible working conditions from employers.
