Seven technology trends for 2018 that IT pros need to know

As 2017 draws to a close, IT industry leaders are considering the technology trends that will impact their business in the year ahead and beyond.

Analysts at research firm Gartner recently attended an industry conference in Orlando and presented their predictions for the latest strategic technology trends in 2018.

Gartner believes that "strategic technology trends are a substantive disruptive potential that will transform into broader impact and application in emerging countries, with a rapidly growing trend that is highly volatile and will reach a critical point in the next five years."

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Here are seven strategic technology trends for 2018 that are relevant to IT professionals, and what you can do now to prepare:

(1) Artificial Intelligence Foundation

Gartner predicts that by 2020, creating systems that learn and act autonomously will become a "primary battleground" for technology vendors.

Action Item: Invest in skills, processes, and tools to build AI-enhanced systems; including data preparation, integration, algorithm and training method selection; and model creation.

(2) Intelligent applications and analytics

Applications and services will continue to incorporate some level of AI. According to Gartner, intelligent applications create a “new intelligent intermediary layer between people and systems” and have the potential to change the nature of work and the workplace.

Action item: Think about how AI can add business value to software and services and improve user experience

(3) Digital Mirror

Gartner says digital twins are a promising area over the next three to five years in the context of IoT projects. Digital twin assets have the “potential to significantly improve enterprise decision making.”

Action Item: Consider a strategy for the digital twin; over time, improve the ability to collect and visualize the right data, apply the right analytics, and effectively address business goals

(4) From the cloud to the edge

Edge computing enables the collection and delivery of content closer to the source of that information, reducing latency.

Action Item: Start using edge design patterns in your infrastructure architecture

(5) Platform for dialogue

Gartner says that while conversational platforms have reached a tipping point in their understanding of language and basic user intent, they still fall short.

According to Gartner, over the next few years, conversational platforms will be delivered in dedicated hardware, core operating system features, platforms and applications.

Action Item: Choose a conversational platform with a strong conversational model and API to help deliver complex outcomes

(6) Event-driven

According to Gartner, business activities are “digitally represented” and reflect states or changes in states that are found to be significant, such as a purchase order being completed or an airplane landing.

Gartner says event brokers, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, blockchain, in-memory data management, and artificial intelligence can all help enterprise events be detected faster and analyzed in more detail.

Gartner says, “Event thinking is a critical component of a digital business-native organization. A well-functioning digital business is always in the ecosystem, always aware and ready to respond, so it must be well-grounded in event processing.”

Action Item: Consider the need for cultural and leadership changes and technology to adopt event thinking.

(7) Continuous Adaptation of Risk and Trust

According to Gartner, the Continuous Adaptive Risk and Trust Assessment (CARTA) approach allows for real-time decision making and lowers barriers between security and application teams.

Action item: Integrate security testing at multiple points into the DevOps workflow (DevSecOps).