With the advent of the internet came an entirely new ecosystem for businesses to thrive in. E-commerce is now a major force, and even non-online businesses are utilizing tech improvements to make their operations more efficient. The revolutionizing effect that technology has on every aspect of our lives today is no secret, and it is certainly had a huge impact on the way we do business. This includes how we communicate with clients, customers, suppliers, and colleagues, as well as using the tools available online to manage sales and marketing activities and various administrative processes. In this article, we will take a look at what 2022 can bring to digital technology for business and how it can affect us.
Blockchain Is Here to Stay
If you have been following the financial and information technology industry in the past few years, you have most likely heard of blockchain. Using blockchain technology, you can create smart contracts that self-execute when certain conditions occur, even if there is no person present to “sign” off on them (for example, if a buyer pays a seller more than what is listed on an online auction, the contract automatically sends funds from the buyer to the seller once the conditions are met), which eliminates fraud and makes trading much safer.
Many experts predict that blockchain technology will be mainstream by 2022. The blockchain has been around since 2008, but it was not until 2017 that the world started paying attention to it—the year that Bitcoin gained widespread recognition and adoption as a new payment system for digital assets and goods online and offline worldwide. Still, even then, the true power of blockchain was not fully realized until 2018, when it burst into mainstream prominence with the advent of Ethereum and other blockchains built on top of Ethereum, such as NEO. In the following years to come (especially next year), we can expect that the blockchain will play a more prominent role in business.
The Digital Data Storage Economy
Data storage has become the new oil. It is a fact of life in modern computing, and the leaders in data storage technology are constantly looking to make things even faster and cheaper by reducing latency, increasing bandwidth, and scaling capacity on ever-smaller physical devices that fit inside our pocket or into our home network closet somewhere (think NAS). One place where these trends meet is the hard drive market—also known as disk drives—which has been a driving force behind the adoption of solid-state storage (SSD) technology for years now.
However, another critical aspect of digital storage is the cloud. It powers everything that makes your digital life possible today: social media, streaming video, online gaming, mobile payments, emailing, messaging, etc. The cloud enables businesses and individuals to access their files seamlessly from any device or computer- while also processing complex computations even with a low-powered device. Businesses and consumers alike need to understand what the future of cloud data is going to look like and how they can be prepared for it now in order to thrive into the next decade and beyond as data storage becomes more central to our lives than ever before.
Less-coding More Productivity
The term “low code” has been around since 2011. But it was not until 2015 when low-code frameworks were born, allowing developers to build websites, mobile apps, and back-end services with just one or two clicks and without writing any code at all—as long as they had a basic understanding of programming concepts such as variables and arrays and the ability to use HTML/CSS and JavaScript (or other languages). This essentially meant that programming software for business use has become much faster and more efficient, resulting in more time spent honing and developing it versus laying it from the ground up.
The most popular low-code platforms include Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code and Workplace by SAP, as well as Salesforce’s ChatterBox and S/4HANA Cloud Services Platform (SPS). These types of low-code platforms enable those with scant tech knowledge to create useful and innovative applications for different types of work purposes. This has benefited many industries and professionals, such as property management franchisees having an interface for their property and necessary documentation, inventory trackers and managers gaining the ability to monitor and track their inventory in real-time, and a lot more.
Technological innovations will continue to push business operations forward. The convenience we enjoy today is but a cusp to shift into full digitization, something we can all expect to arrive sooner rather than later.