Gartner and the Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021

For organizations the world over, COVID-19 led to drastic operational changes overnight. On-premises-only styles of work were quickly supplanted by fully remote workforces. This shift had (and continues to have) massive implications for IT and security teams. In essence, the pandemic killed the perimeter and the legacy security strategies that organizations had leaned upon for years. Fortunately, in Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021, Gartner explains the impact of the global pandemic on businesses around the globe and makes suggestions about what organizations can do in order to succeed in 2021.

Digital Transformation

Organizations have had digital transformation on their agendas for years, with some welcoming it more readily than others. Regardless, the events of 2020 illustrated the importance of digital transformation and forced countless companies to embrace the change. With the shift to remote work, organizations now have employees performing their work duties and handling sensitive data anywhere and everywhere–not to mention the third-party users like contractors, suppliers, and customers that may also need access to corporate resources. This demands resilient delivery of IT services to any location in the world. Any system downtime or performance issues mean a loss of business continuity and, consequently, money. Obviously, leaning upon the global, infinitely powerful cloud is the solution to these challenges.

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Similarly, to secure this new IT ecosystem, organizations need a highly flexible platform capable of securing any interaction in any location, through a robust, cloud-based architecture that maintains the uptime, performance, and scalability required in today’s business world.

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)

SASE offerings are cloud-delivered platforms that are designed to secure data and defend against threats across locations, devices, cloud services, and beyond. By integrating complementary technologies like cloud access security broker (CASB), secure web gateway (SWG), and zero trust network access (ZTNA), they provide everything that organizations need to stay safe. SASE platforms provide highly granular, intelligent protections that consider factors like user identity, user location, sensitive data patterns, resource accessed, and more. Additionally, when they are built upon a true cloud architecture, they can leverage the infinite power of the public cloud to deliver the uptime, performance, and scalability that is needed when securing operations taking place around the clock and across the globe. In 2021, organizations should turn to SASE.

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Gartner, Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021, 19 October 2020, Brian Burke, Frances Karamouzis, Gilbert van der Heiden, Arun Chandrasekaran, David Cearley, Bart Willemsen, Brent Stewart, Ramon Krikken, Jay Heiser, Erick Brethenoux, Jason Wong, Michael Chiu, Michelle Duerst, Don Scheibenreif, Manjunath Bhat, Tony Harvey, Nicole Sturgill, Laurie Shotton, Stephanie Stoudt-Hansen, Gene Alvarez, Dennis Gaughan, Andrew White, David Smith, Ed Anderson, David Wright, Yefim Natis

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