As we enter 2022, we are on track to see a range of new and emerging technologies that may prove very beneficial for small to medium sized businesses. Technology is often a big factor on the success of an SMB, because implementing the right technology can make it much easier for a small business to succeed. We spoke with TechQuarters, an IT company from London who has been supporting SMBs for over a decade; they told us about some of the emerging tech trends to look out for in this new year.
Hybrid Cloud & Multi Cloud
The Cloud is one of the most useful technologies any business can implement, but especially for an SMB. Implementing a Cloud infrastructure can make a business more agile, and open up all kinds of opportunities for security, automation, and even hiring talent from around the world. Traditionally, there were two types of Cloud – Public and Private. Businesses are choosing to move to the cloud now more than ever, even super secure and data dependant are making the move. There are specialised partners who can help, like ones providing IT Support for Financial Services as an example, that give expert guidance during and after the migration.
A private Cloud was one built and ran at a business’ site, which gave all the benefits of Cloud storage and virtualisation, on top of superb latency and data transfer speeds. On the other hand, Public Clouds may have lower latency and transfer speeds, but may have better and more advanced infrastructures that businesses may take advantage of (such is the case with Microsoft Azure).
In 2022, two new types of Cloud setup will become more common: Hybrid and Multi Cloud. Hybrid Cloud is the utilisation of both private and public clouds, enabling businesses to take advantage of the strengths of both types of Cloud. On the other hand, a Multi Cloud setup is the use of two or more Public Clouds for supreme data redundancy.
Artificial Intelligence
While many people still think AI is an inaccessible technology, or even a thing that only really exists in science fiction, the trend of using Artificial Intelligence for business has been growing steadily, and looks to be getting even bigger in 2022. The primary benefit Artificial Intelligence can have for small- to medium-sized businesses is that potential for machine learning to drastically cut down the time it takes to analyse data – this in turn means a company can utilize business intelligence to make smarter business decisions.
Containerisation
One advantage SMBs have over larger enterprises is that they are able to implement remote and hybrid working more easily – which is important these days with the Covid-19 pandemic persisting. SMBs can more easily implement technologies that enable remote working, such as Cloud computing and storage. In the UK, companies provide unique IT Services London businesses can use to make the move to the cloud and help set up a remote working setup for their employees. One of the challenges of remote working, however, is ensuring all users have the applications they need on their at-home PCs.
Thankfully, with the emerging tech trend of containerisation, this challenge will be much easier to overcome. Containerisation is the process of packaging software together with all of its dependencies, so that it can be distribute to multiple endpoints simultaneously via the Cloud. This will mean companies can distribute applications from the Cloud to all their users with ease.
Hyper Automation
Automation is the process of setting tasks to be executed automatically, which is achieved by implementing specific rules for a machine such as a PC or server to follow, so that with the right triggers, they can perform the task without the need for human participation. The benefit of this technology for small- to medium-sized businesses is that it means much less time needs to be dedicated to menial tasks and processes – automating them means staff can dedicate more time to higher priority tasks.
While automation is not in itself a new trend, the level at which were are capable of implementing automation is steadily growing; for instance, we used to only be able to automate very basic tasks, now we can automate whole processes, and even initiate multiple, interlinking processes to be carried out automatically – this is what we now call Hyper Automation, and it could grow even to the point of being carried out on the business ecosystem level.
