As the first chapter of a new decade draws to a close one thing is clear—COVID-19 has fundamentally altered our lives. The pandemic has kicked off the grandest experiment in remote work the world has ever seen. Enterprise Technology Research survey projects that the global number of permanent remote workers will double in 2021. And a McKinsey Global Survey of executives found that COVID-19 boosted the adoption of digital technologies by 7 years.
As the ongoing crisis continues to fuel rapid innovation at a breakneck pace, there’s no time like the present to pause, take a breather, and look back at the technology trends that shaped the last decade to help us chart a course through the 2020s. Here they are in no particular order: the top 10 digital transformation trends of the last decade.
1. Big Data is becoming bigger, faster, and multidimensional
It’s 2020 and Big Data is bigger, faster, and more multidimensional than ever before. The total volume of data created worldwide in 2010 was 2 million terabytes or 2 zettabytes, a number that’s projected to reach 59 zettabytes in 2020.
Source: Statista.com
In many ways, the story of the last decade was really about managing the exponential growth of Big Data through technological innovation and covers the rest of the digital transformation trends on this list.
In the realm of Big Data analytics, we saw Hadoop dethrone Google’s MapReduce paradigm in 2011, Harvard Business Review label data scientist “the sexiest job of the 21st century” in 2012, and NoSQL databases like MongoDB and Hazelcast rise to the challenge of storing unstructured data. We also saw the emergence of high throughput data streaming technologies like Spark become the gold standard of modern data analytics pipelines.
So what does the next decade in Big Data analytics look like? We’re seeing increasing importance of using machine learning algorithms and AI to process large volumes of unstructured data like images, video, and audio. Demand for data storytelling and data visualization skills will likely continue to rise as organizations seek to turn their data into actionable insights.
Looking for top independent talent to help you modernize your data analytics pipeline? From data scientists to business intelligence professionals to Python developers, we have the talent you need to extract valuable insights from your data.
2. Advances in AI and machine learning are accelerating
Both a key driver and beneficiary of exponentially larger data sets—the last decade saw AI and machine learning go mainstream in a big way. We now have AI assistants like Amazon Alexa entertaining our house guests and recommendation engines on streaming platforms like Netflix planning our next binge.
So what talent should you invest in to help your business take advantage of the AI revolution? Data scientists, machine learning developers, and AI researchers seem to have settled on Python as the programming language of choice for AI. Frameworks like Tensorflow and PyTorch will likely play a key role in developing the next AI technologies. Check out our guide on reskilling in the age of AI.
The future of AI is only going to get brighter with self-driving cars and robot assistants on the horizon. Tesla Motors routinely rolls out Autopilot upgrades to their existing fleet of electric vehicles, each patch bringing us closer to self-driving cars. Google Duplex stunned the world with its human-like natural language processing (NLP) capabilities allowing Google Assistant to book reservations at a restaurant. Conversational AI will likely play a major role in transforming the way we interact with machines in the next decade.
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3. User Experience (UX) as a core differentiator
In 2010, only 20.2% of the US population owned a smartphone, the first iPad had just been released, and words like UX and responsive design were just starting to go mainstream. Designers had to learn how to craft user experiences around touch screens and desktops alike, contending with an increasingly fragmented ecosystem of devices.
Flash forward to the present, and the UI/UX design industry has hit its stride. Whole ecosystems of tools like Sketch and InVision popped up to help designers create vector graphics that scale with different screen sizes. Designs are validated in the field via user testing, real-time analytics, and tight customer feedback loops.
So what does the future look like for UI/UX design? Key digital technologies to look out for include:
- Augmented Reality (AR)
- Virtual Reality (VR)
- AI/Voice interfaces improved UX analytics
Organizations will want to ensure their creative teams are savvy on the best practices for designing a variety of new user interfaces and experiences.
Looking for top independent talent to help you craft a modern UX for your customers? From UX designers to UI designers to AR/VR developers, we have the talent you need to create an app experience your customers will love.
4. Embracing the cloud with everything as a service
The drive to consistently deliver a superior customer experience also forced businesses to rethink their business models. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) had already gone mainstream by 2010, but in many ways, the cloud services revolution was only beginning.
The decade of the 2010s was about switching everything from expensive one-time purchases to pay-as-you-use subscriptions which deliver better value for businesses and customers alike. From SaaS apps to the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and platforms as a service (PaaS) apps that supported them, today’s consumers enjoy everything as a service (XaaS).
So what type of talent will you need to ride the XaaS wave? The next decade will be about standing on the shoulders of cloud giants like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. A cloud solutions architect can help you set up the IT infrastructure you need to deliver always-on availability to your customers.
Looking for top independent talent to build your XaaS apps? From software developers to cloud computing specialists, we have the talent you need to deliver cloud agility to your customers.
5. Virtualization spurs consolidation under the hybrid cloud
Powering the cloud revolution from behind the scenes, virtualization—the core technology behind cloud computing—has come a long way since 2010. The following decade proved to be a container renaissance, with the emergence of new platforms like Docker (2013), Kubernetes (2014), and AWS ECS (2015).
If the last decade was about adopting new tools and technologies to help your organization move its service offerings into the cloud, the theme of the next decade will be about consolidating siloed on-premises and cloud infrastructure into unified IaaS or PaaS offerings that can deliver on-demand storage and compute resources at scale.
Businesses that can invest in virtual machines, containers, and microservices architectures today will have the operational agility needed to pivot and thrive during future crises like the pandemic. Early adopters of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) were able to migrate their personnel remotely in a pinch. But what does the next decade have in store for virtualization?
In all likelihood, the emphasis on virtualization will continue to be about finding new ways to consolidate and improve data mobility across your organization. It’s about bringing your public and private clouds together into a hybrid cloud infrastructure that’s always available, can upgrade without disruption of service, and scale on-demand.
Looking for top independent talent to help you virtualize your data center? From VMware administrators to Kubernetes developers, we have the talent you need to bring the wonders of hybrid cloud consolidation to your organization.
6. The World Wide Web is evolving
The internet is a very different place than it was 10 years ago. In 2010 AngularJS was the most popular JavaScript framework on the web. MVC reigned supreme, and people used libraries like jQuery and Backbone.js and CSS preprocessors like Less to create dynamic single-page apps (SPAs) that delivered a desktop-like experience in the cloud.
While these fundamentals haven’t completely gone away in 2020, the meta of web development has completely changed. Responsive design is now a hard requirement to address the increase in browsing from mobile devices. We now have a proliferation of server-side and front-end web frameworks to choose from when building apps for the web. From site-builders like Squarespace to the big three JavaScript frameworks: Angular, React, and Vue, to good old-fashioned content management systems (CMSs) like WordPress and Joomla, there have never been more ways to build for the web.
So what does the next decade have in store for web development? The API economy will continue to play a major role in increasing the interconnectivity between websites and apps. Web developers will likely need to address voice search optimization, embedded AR, AI chatbots, and other advanced features within their web pages. As more people browse the web from their mobile devices, AMP (accelerated mobile pages) will become more important to ensure higher-performing web pages.
Looking for top independent talent to help you build your web apps? Whether you need help with JavaScrip frameworks like React, CMSs like WordPress, or ecommerce site builders like Shopify, we have the web development talent you need to bring your web project to life.
7. Bitcoin and beyond with the blockchain
Digital scarcity and transparency are brought to you via an immutable distributed ledger technology that leverages cryptography to make most fraud computationally infeasible—the 2010s were very much the decades of the blockchain.
At the time of this writing, the price of Bitcoin is on track to contest its 2017 high of $19,783, fluctuating around $18,000 per coin. This makes it all the more surreal when you look back to 2010, the year the first Bitcoin exchange was established, when the cryptocurrency was trading between $0.008-$0.125 per coin. The word blockchain was coined that same year on the BitcoinTalk forums.
Today you can trade more than 5,000 different altcoins across the world. But cryptocurrencies are just the tip of the iceberg of what you can do with the blockchain. Decentralized apps called dApps leverage the immutable ledger system in innovative ways to remove the need for a central authority and allow transactions to occur without a third party. Ethereum has turned into the de facto platform for building dApps.
Looking for top independent talent to help you build your apps? From cryptocurrency specialists to blockchain developers, we have the talent you need to bring your blockchain project to life.
8. Edge computing and the Internet of Things
In 2010, when most people talked about the Internet of Things, they were usually talking about RFID chips in smart supply chains and smartphones. In the DIY community, Arduino reigned supreme.
Today we have smart homes, smart speakers, and fleets of drones and autonomous vehicles as part of the IoT. The technology continues to accelerate alongside advances in AI and virtualization pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
So what can we look forward to in the next decade of IoT? The era of edge computing may be on the horizon—we’re seeing a convergence of technologies like faster connection speeds with 5G, smaller flash memory drives and processors, and novel microservices architectures that make it possible for fleets of devices to run calculations like nodes in a compute cluster.
Looking for top independent talent to help you build your IoT-powered apps? Leading IoT platforms include Google Cloud IoT Core, AWS IoT Core, Azure IoT, and IBM Watson IoT. From IoT specialists to Arduino programmers, we have the talent you need to get your IoT project off the ground.
9. Agile, DevOps, and Robotic Process Automation
Just as technology had to evolve to solve new problems, so too did the methodologies for organizing and managing a business’s digital transformation. In 2010 everyone knew they had to be Agile, but adoption was another story—only 40% of organizations had been practicing Agile development processes for more than 2 years. A number that increased to 61% by 2020.
And while the benefits of Agile methodologies like TDD or Scrum were immediately apparent to development teams the same could not be said for the rest of the organization. Particularly friction between developers who created public-facing apps and operations staff who managed the supporting IT infrastructure was causing problems as applications scale.
Enter the DevOps toolchain—automation tools that could help an organization unify the workflows of their operations and development teams and build largely automated continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
The coming decade will largely be about mastering an evolving DevOps toolchain. The skillset of a DevOps engineer in 2020 might look something like this:
- Configuration management tools such as Ansible, Chef, and Puppet
- Source code management tools such as GitHub and Bitbucket
- Continuous integration tools like Jenkins
- Continuous testing tools like Selenium
- Continuous monitoring tools such as Nagios and Splunk
- Container orchestration with Kubernetes or Docker Swarm
It will be interesting to see how the DevOps toolchain will evolve in the 2020s, but the general trend towards infrastructure as code (IaC) is a safe bet.
So what digital technologies will shape our quest to become more agile in the next decade? If the early 2000s saw developers kick off the Agile movement, and the 2010s saw organizational agility expand to operations, it looks like the next decade will be about bringing Agile to the rest of the organization through new technologies such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
RPA involves using bots to mimic human user actions such as logging into apps, moving files and folders, filling out forms, and scraping the web for information. It’s the next frontier of automation, and you don’t have to be tech-savvy to take advantage of it—your typical office worker can have an RPA tool monitor their actions as they perform a repetitive task, then automate it away freeing up their time for more complex and creative work. UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and WorkFusion are the Magic Quadrant leaders for RPA tools.
Looking for top independent talent to help you implement RPA at your organization? Search for top RPA professionals to meet your needs today.
10. Cybersecurity is top of mind for everyone
No matter which of the digital transformation technologies on this list you choose to implement in your technology stack in 2020 and beyond, there’s one thing that’s top of mind for everyone: cybersecurity.
An FBI report revealed the total number of reported losses from consumer complaints in the United States alone to be $3.5 billion in 2019, a number that was only $485 million in 2011 (the FBI did not disclose total losses in 2010). From ransomware attacks like NotPetya to nation-sponsored industrial espionage like Stuxnet, the attacks employed by hackers are growing in complexity.
So what can your business do to stay ahead of cyber criminals? The OWASP Top Ten is a good place to start. The list is routinely updated by cybersecurity professionals to keep track of best practices for preventing the biggest web application security threats from SQL injection to cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.
Want to be on the cutting edge of cybersecurity in the next decade? Adversarial machine learning is one trend to watch. Look for tools and technologies that use AI and predictive analytics to prevent cyber attacks before they occur. By leveraging data collected from IT logging and monitoring systems, an AI can spot patterns a human system administrator might miss, catching and patching vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.
Looking for top independent talent to help you stay secure in the next decade? A certified ethical hacker (CEH) can run penetration tests to identify security vulnerabilities and a certified information systems security professional (CISSP) can ensure security best practices are built in to your technologies and processes.
The next decade of digital transformation
In the immortal words of Maya Angelou: “You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been.” Looking back at the last decade, the message is clear. It takes more than keeping up with the latest technology trends to devise a solid digital transformation strategy. It’s about finding the right tools, technology, and talent to help your organization use its resources more efficiently. Whether it’s data, resources, or labor, efficiency is the driving force behind digital transformation.
