By Michael Skurla, CTO, Radix IoT
2020 has been a year of disruption for everyone living on planet Earth. Interestingly, technology has been a positive force in 2020 offering stability and growth. Though not without hurdles, the data industry (and I.T. if I were to include a category) was pushed into an amazing race to prove its claims. This was driven by end-users’ needs to change and adapt to the world that became immediately reliant on its technology and platforms.
Resilience has been the word of the year for the I.T. space. This manifestation appeared across multiple domains—from rapid e-commerce expansion to widespread video conferencing adoption at consumer levels, spanning education and critical business functions. Infrastructure demonstrated its capacity to sustain operations.
Had such a pandemic occurred five or ten years earlier, circumstances would have presented substantially greater challenges. Data center systems, network infrastructure, and cloud computing all demonstrated that business continuity remained achievable and, for certain organizations, profitable.
The accelerated 2020 transition to new operational norms required rapid infrastructure scaling. Many lessons emerged from this accelerated pace, and expectations have shifted permanently. Remote work arrangements will likely persist at significantly higher levels than pre-pandemic baselines. Organizations discovered that office overhead expenses often cannot justify in-office mandates when remote productivity proves equivalent or superior.
2021 will prioritize addressing vulnerabilities identified in 2020 to sustain remote enablement. Security will be at the forefront of innovation and advancement in 2021. The expansion of IoT monitoring and sensing infrastructure, combined with intelligent ecosystem development in residential and commercial applications, creates opportunities for enhanced security standards. The U.S. Senate’s passage of the IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act represents significant progress toward establishing comprehensive edge security frameworks.
Additionally, latency reduction will command attention, particularly within telecommunications sectors. Marketing typically emphasizes bandwidth, yet latency represents the crucial factor enabling autonomous technologies—drones, self-driving vehicles, and systems requiring instantaneous analytical decisions. Edge data center infrastructure and 5G rollout by carriers facilitate these advancements, enabling ubiquitous IoT expansion.
Originally published in VMBlog.