We’ve just turned the page on a new year and whole new decade and the pace of technology is expected to continue racing on. The companies that anticipate and adopt new technology trends will be the best positioned to take advantage of what they can do for their business growth and productivity.
If you just think back to the beginning of the last decade. A trend of 2010 was the iPad, which was introduced in April of that year, and now is partially responsible for the significant rise in mobile computing at work. We also didn’t have voice-activated assistants yet in 2010, like Amazon Echo, which are now in homes and offices around the world changing the way we interact with our smart devices. What new advances in technology are going to be changing small business IT for the next decade? We’ll go through the top trends in technology expected in 2020 so you can be ready to get a jump start on your competition.
IT Advances Coming for Office Productivity, Cost Reduction, and More
According to a small business study by Google, 80% of small businesses aren’t taking full advantage of technology. But for the other 20% that are, they see significant benefits in a number of ways, including:
- Revenue growth of nearly 4x over the prior year
- Earning 2x more revenue per employee
- Being 3x more likely to have exported their goods or services over the prior year
Knowing about new tech trends and having the expert IT support you need to make the most of them, means higher productivity, lower costs, and other advantages that come with being a digitally advanced company. Here are the biggest trends you’ll seeing impacting offices in Singapore and beyond this year (and this decade).
Democratization of Expertise
The term “democratization of expertise” means to remove the expertise needed to take advantage of certain technology and simplify the deployment for everyone, reducing cost and barriers to entry. For example, having a custom business app can cost a small business anywhere between $50,000 to $100,000 USD and can mean having to hire an outside firm or employee with extensive app coding abilities. This makes it difficult for smaller companies to take advantage of the benefits of a custom application. Microsoft’s democratization of expertise in this area comes through their Power Apps platform. It’s a tool that allows anyone without any coding experience to build a custom business app easily through a drag and drop style interface. It also brings the price down to between $10/user/app/month and $40/user/month. Look for more sophisticated processes being simplified this year, bringing more tech capabilities to businesses that may have been locked out in the past due to the cost and skills needed to deploy them.
Hyper Automation with Machine Learning
You’ve most likely been hearing the term machine learning in the past year or so. It refers to the use of algorithms and statistical models to perform tasks without human intervention. Used alongside automation, machine learning can boost it into a realm called “hyper” automation, where the technology is making decisions based upon statistical analysis to choose the next process in an automation. A simple example would be the use of an email nurturing campaign that’s sent to new website leads:
- Automation: You choose the emails in advance and designate the trigger for each to be sent to a recipient.
- Hyper Automation: You set up the emails and allow the process to automatically choose the best one to send based upon statistical analysis of user behavior.
Edge Computing
The advent of completely cloud-operated offices means that the speed that data gets served to your users from a cloud environment can have a big impact on daily productivity. Edge computing is the mechanism of putting those cloud servers closer to your physical location to keep the traffic and processing local and reduce latency. This will most likely begin to show up for companies in the information they provide when signing up for a cloud service, i.e. being asked where the data is going to be physically accessed from so the service can choose their closest data center to host your account.
Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity
One of the biggest trends in the cybersecurity field is the use of AI. It’s being used increasingly by criminals deploying cyberattacks and also being used by IT security software creators to thwart attacks. The use of AI along with machine learning in antivirus/anti-malware and advanced threat protection applications will allow the program to leverage autonomous actions to protect a network from attack, basing decision-making on pattern recognition, rather than matching a file to a known threat database. This use of AI in cybersecurity can help businesses keep up with ever more sophisticated threats by giving more capabilities to protective solutions that safeguard networks and endpoints.
Head into 2020 with a Strong IT Partner at Your Side
Managed IT Asia is a professional and trusted IT services partner dedicated to offering exceptional service to small businesses in Singapore and across Asia. We can help you position your company to take advantage of the new tech tends that will help you get ahead of your competition. Contact us today for a free IT consultation. Call +65 6748 8776 or reach us online.
MANAGED IT ASIA, we are an IT Support, IT Solutioning and Managed IT Service Provider specializing in serving Small Businesses across Asia. Call us at +65 6748 8776 and let us manage your Small Business IT today!