Our sales and engineering teams at PTP have been busy over the last year listening to what our customers need and working with our strategic technology partners to deliver impactful solutions. This “Top 10” list from PTP was not written by a single person—instead, this blog was crowdsourced by the entire PTP organization. We requested each individual to offer their own top 2 or 3 technologies that would make the most difference in 2020, consolidated the results without sharing anyone’s answers, and tallied the results. This process avoids the groupthink phenomenon and provides the greatest amount of diversity.
Our results and projections for 2020:
1) 5G Wireless – The 5G technology will affect businesses’ decisions in how to provision and support remote sites. This new and developing mobile network technology will support speeds that are faster than many of the cheaper wired connections, and businesses will start to provision their remote sites with this as their primary connectivity option. There will be great savings in terms of wiring and hardware costs, especially for biotech and life sciences field operations that depend on speed and flexibility.
2) Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence – An excerpt from a ZDNet article outlines the improvements made in decision making by AI versus humans in certain areas: “According to Google, the model’s results were better than radiologists from both countries. From reading scans of 3,000 women in the United States, the model produced a 5.7% reduction of false positives and a 9.4% reduction in false negatives. On 25,000 mammograms performed in the United Kingdom, the system reduced false negatives by 2.7% and false positives by 1.2%.” This highlights how AI is becoming essential across life sciences, with major implications for IT infrastructure and compliance.
3) Multi-Cloud & Inter-Cloud Networking – Cloud growth continues, and use of multiple clouds in larger deployments will as well. With multi-cloud comes network challenges and the need to address limitations, lack of visibility, and manual processes. Multi-cloud networking solutions are ready for prime time from vendors like Aviatrix—and are increasingly relevant for managed cloud services for life sciences companies with distributed infrastructure.
4) Cloud Growth and Migrations – With cloud adoption already mainstream, Gartner expects the cloud IaaS segment to grow 24% YoY. From the Gartner article: “This growth is attributed to the demands of modern applications and workloads, which require infrastructure that traditional data centers cannot meet.”
There is much talk about cloud migration, but to truly accelerate the pace of migration, the assessment and TCO/ROI analysis cost and time requirements need to be reduced. Most businesses are not going to blindly move to the cloud. They need to see hard numbers and be confident that moving to the cloud is the right financial decision. Helping these businesses through this process in a cost-effective manner will be critical to mass adoption of cloud services.
5) SD-WAN – Evolution from hardware-based vendor solutions to cloud-based offerings, all of which allow businesses to connect people to information more efficiently and more cost-effectively. This technology continues to play a role in enabling life sciences IT support for global collaboration and secure access.
6) IoT – The growth in use-cases continues. There are cameras, thermostats, in-house speaker systems, and refrigerators that can send alerts if the door gets left open or the temperature changes. By the end of 2020, we will all be getting alerts from even more devices—all of which increases opportunities for security breaches. For biotech companies handling sensitive data, this makes integrated IT and security strategies critical.
7) Security in the Cloud – Anyone worried about data security in the cloud needs to take a hard look at what they spend to protect their data in their current data center or colocation facility. Few businesses—especially those in the life sciences space—have the resources to match what cloud providers can offer. They have the talent, tooling, and 24x7x365 operations that most commercial environments can’t replicate. Partnering with a trusted managed IT provider for life sciences organizations can ensure alignment with life sciences compliance and risk requirements.
8) Cloud Management Consolidation – The prediction from our team of experts is that this year, we will see consolidation via acquisition in the numerous cloud and hybrid-cloud management tools. Larger providers will improve their portfolios by purchasing point-product vendor solutions, ultimately improving the end customer’s ability for enterprise cloud management.
9) VPN Access for Security – The increasingly mobile workforce will rely on secure methods to access enterprise applications in the cloud and on-premises. The questions that need to be answered based on the unique environment are where to do it and how. For life sciences companies managing clinical research or lab systems remotely, VPN design plays a critical role in secure connectivity.
10) Edge Computing – With a link to the developments of 5G wireless and IoT, edge computing will grow in its relevance and value. Gartner defines edge computing as “a part of a distributed computing topology in which information processing is located close to the edge—where things and people produce or consume that information.” This will be especially impactful in use cases like connected labs and real-time data analysis in biotech.
Best wishes on a prosperous 2020!
Want to See Which of These Technologies Could Impact Your Environment?
Schedule a free whiteboard session with our engineering team to explore how these trends apply to your environment.