Nowadays, technologies are evolving tremendously fast, enabling various companies, organizations, and individuals to change and progress. COVID-19 pandemic also accelerated the technology progress because IT professionals had to come up with fast and efficient solutions to achieve the best results in a variety of different fields. Knowing the fact that the technology industry always brings surprises, it’s interesting to delve deeper into the top technology trends of 2022. 

Andrius Gataveckas, a Lead IT Service Manager at Luminor, agreed to tell us about the exciting world of technologies and what we can expect in 2022

Computing power

Did you know that 2020 has marked the birth of the computing power infrastructure? Specialists say that we have entered the digital economic civilization. This trend is being driven by the combination of Artificial Intelligence (AI), 5G (even 6G), quantum computing, big data, and blockchain. To understand it better, let’s take an example of an AI system. To recognize someone’s voice and identify something in a picture or a video, AI needs to process millions of audio, image, or video samples to learn to differentiate. A massive amount of data is also required to enable this, so the more computing power we have, the faster we can feed that data and train the AI to reach perfection. Some have been using computing power to mine bitcoin; others switched their farms to AI computing. It’s not only a technical but also an economic innovation.

Quantum computing

These computers can process information in a fundamentally different way from traditional computers and have the potential to give us the computing power that is a trillion times more powerful than what we can get from today’s supercomputers. Quantum computers aren’t limited to doing one thing at a time like most classic computers. Thus, complex problem solving can be done in minutes rather than years. It’s also predicted that, in the future, quantum computers will be able to solve intractable problems. As of today, the most powerful countries of the world, such as the United States, Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom, and others, are investing billions of dollars in this quantum race because it has a significant potential to deliver answers about our universe and even super-intelligence or human intelligence.

Artificial intelligence

With the world becoming more and more digitized and Artificial Intelligence (AI) trending around for the past decade, it still remains one of the biggest technology trends. AI affects our daily lives, work routines, and even hobbies. Your phone or smartwatch can learn how well you sleep or when you need exercise. A digital companion at work can be a helpful asset when it comes to reminding you where to focus next by analyzing trends in different sources and comparing them to your past actions or even suggesting a solution on its own. For example, it can analyze interactions and determine underlying connections to help predict demand for services like shops, hospitals, etc., by enabling the authorities to make better decisions and detect changing patterns in near real-time. Multiplayer gaming is no longer relying on human players; AI can even give a challenge or beat the professionals. Self-driving cars, voice recognition, and face recognition have become a norm in the modern world. It’s forecasted that the AI market will grow to 190 billion dollars by 2025 with global spending.

Cybersecurity

This topic has been out for a while now, and it may not seem like an emerging technology anymore, but it’s evolving just because other technologies are. Accessing data illegally or just hacking isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. As long as we have someone who wants to steal the data or cause some inconvenience – cybersecurity will remain a trending technology. The need for professionals in this area grows significantly – it’s predicted that there will be 3.5 million job openings in 2025. Since the traceability of impactful hacks is usually almost impossible, the only way to fight it’s by having a decent defense. 

2021 has been a year of ransomware attacks. Various companies were impacted by malicious software that encrypted their data and essentially stopped operations. Hackers asked to be paid in cryptocurrency to stop their malicious actions. Here are some of the biggest attacks of last year:

• Log4j – 3.7 million hacking attempts were recorded because the vulnerability allowed malicious persons to steal data;
• Kaseya – more than 1000 companies were compromised by having their virtual storage servers crippled; the hacker group has asked for 70 million USD in bitcoin;
• SolarWinds (Orion) – thousands of customers, including the US government, were exposed. A data leak has even impacted the state, local and federal agencies that use Orion network systems vulnerable to data hack.

Data sharing

New technology simplifies the mechanics of data sharing across and between organizations while preserving its privacy. Businesses and organizations are discovering more value from their sensitive data while also leveraging big volumes of external data that have traditionally been off the limits. This may open new opportunities, as the ability to efficiently share vast amounts of secured data with others is giving quite a start for new business models and products. COVID-19 situation illustrates this very well – by pooling clinical data on shared platforms in the early stage of the pandemic, researchers were able to speed up the development of treatments and vaccines. These same-data sharing protocols have helped coordinate and execute vaccination programs that focus on efficiency and safety while preserving intellectual property.

Conclusion

It’s exciting to follow the latest news and see how various technologies are evolving to help organizations and regular people ease their daily operations and lives. We hope this article helped you understand the top technologies in 2022 and how they’re improving.  

Of course, we didn’t mention all of the technologies that are predicted to develop faster than ever in 2022, such as 3D printing, extended reality, new energy solutions, and others. We recommend you check this article for more information if you’re interested.