2020 has been quite a year. Hijacked by a global pandemic and exposed to major disruption, the world has experienced a lot of heartache and even more uncertainty.

But as a result of all this chaos, Organizations across the globe are accelerating their digital transformation initiatives at breakneck speeds in a bid to reset and survive.

For better or worse, we can all agree, this year will be memorable. So, as 2020 draws to a close and we enter 2021, here are some of the technologies that are expected to come around and define this next normal.

Cloud's reign continues

Even before the events of 2020, cloud had already established its value for many businesses by providing cost efficiencies across all industries.

This year, however, the technology is helping add a layer of resilience to many organisations by making the sudden shift in working habits less disruptive. This has sealed cloud's place as an essential piece of enterprise tech. In the next five years, the cloud computing industry is expected to huge revenue.

Next year specifically, businesses will focus more on managing their cloud costs better and look to unify their different cloud environments.

In the face of increased competition due to greater prevalence, cloud providers will need to focus on enhancing and integrating security, compliance, and privacy with firewall securities and surveillance our data privacy.

Cloud will also grow in popularity as the ideal execution venue for new and emerging technologies such as blockchain, and edge computing and SAAS.

Thus, making it integral to the digital transformation journey many more businesses are now on.

Intelligent networks are the new normal

The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing businesses to innovate reactively and creatively in order to make work pattern shifts that they thought would take years.

While it might have been a necessity that got them there, the results of this mass experiment have been eye-opening. Despite many preconceptions, remote working has largely been a success where cloud solutions helps with budget cost.

Some 95% of remote workers say their productivity has increased this year, which is great for employers and employee’s as well.

This new normal will put new pressures on companies, as there will be an increasing need for networks capable of supporting virtual architectures - be it cloud, on premises, or edge computing.

As a result, more organisations will start seeking intelligent and intent-based networks that offer integrated security - such as SD-WAN for the WAN with SASE and Zero Trust security or virtual networks for multicloud - to deal with the increased cybersecurity threat of their new perimeter-less ecosystem.

Being able to offer platform stability, ease of use, and personalisation, while maintaining a human touch, will only grow in importance.

More onus will be placed on digital trust. Businesses capable of ensuring the safety of customers' identity, data, and transactions, as well as employee data and transactions, will be rewarded with customer loyalty.

IoT will play a greater role in securing and analysing data .

So competition, more companies will start focusing on data analytics technology capable of securely handling information as well as analysing and deriving greater insights from their mostly unused operational data.

For instance, many of the COVID-19 restrictions are expected to be lifted by end of 2021, However, the ability to offer enhanced experiences by using data better will likely still be a strong deciding factor for many organizations.

So, in all of this, IoT is expected to play a pivotal role - helping to automate processes and make more information readily available to enterprises. And as IoT becomes increasingly intertwined with AI, and more deeply embedded in organisational structures and transformation programmes, devices will become increasingly 'smart' and capable of driving greater intelligence.