Wishing You Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

our founding in 1996 has been to be a part of our clients’ success by ensuring their technology is supporting them as effectively as possible. We’ve always believed that your success is our success. As we close out 2019, let’s take a look at some of the technology trends to keep an eye on in 2020 that promise even more excitement for us all in the years to come.

Technology Trends to Watch in 2020 If you’re taking some downtime at the end of the year to do some business planning for the future, here are a few of the tech trends you’ll want to learn more about.

Windows Virtual Desktop Cloud software has now become the norm in most offices. Just a decade ago, companies were still trying to figure out what the Cloud was, and today a majority of them use at least one cloud-based application. The next logical step is to move your entire computer desktop to the cloud. In fall of 2019, Microsoft launched the Windows Virtual Desktop, which is a clue that taking computers virtual is going to take off significantly in the coming year.

Smart Offices Taking Advantage of Wi-Fi 6 Smart offices using more internet connected devices haven’t been fully realized by many companies due to the constraints of their internet connections. Wi-Fi 5 routers were only designed to handle a certain number of devices. Try to connect too many, and everyone suffers. But with Wi-Fi 6 being released recently means new capabilities for multiple device connections and much faster speeds. This gives offices the opportunity to explore things like work-trained voice assistants, smart thermostats, smart lighting, and more to improve efficiency and time management.

Augmented Reality One of the technologies that’s still fairly relegated to the gaming world is Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). But AR has shown the most promise in helping certain industries improve processes and productivity. AR is particularly helpful in the engineering, architectural, and construction arenas, allowing builders to show overlays of piping and electrical components through a full scale 3D design in order to work out issues before construction begins. As the technology becomes more widely available to businesses, we’ll see it used more for things like manufacturing design and even 3D installation instructions for customers.

Remote Workforce Currently 66% of companies employ remote workers and 16% are run with a fully remote staff. In 2020, the trend towards a more mobile and remote workforce will continue as the statistics keep coming in. Studies show that remote workers are more productive, take less time off, and cost their employers less due to the reduced demands on physical office space. Working virtually has been a trend that’s accompanied the rise of cloud computing, which makes it possible to work from any location, and we’ll see this trend continue in the new year.

“Edge” Computing You’ll begin to hear this new buzz word in 2020. Edge Computing is a product of cloud computing. As more demands are put on cloud servers, it only makes sense that servers in closer proximity to the demand can deliver services faster. So, Edge Computing refers to a paradigm that brings computation and data storage services closer to the client to improve response times and reduce latency (lag time).

More Common Use of Sandboxing Data breaches, ransomware, and other malicious threats are not going anywhere, and they’re actually becoming more sophisticated each year. Now, companies have to deal with zero-day malware, which hasn’t been previously catalogued, and fileless threats designed to use trusted system files against you. Sandboxing is used widely in anti-phishing and anti-malware programs used by managed services to replicate a computer environment and observe a file’s behavior to check its safety. But this technology hasn’t really been utilized in other user-initiated situations. With a new Windows update last year, Windows 10 Pro brought a new sandboxing feature that allows businesses to initiate a sandbox environment of their own to check an unknown program before installing it on their system. As companies become more familiar with sandboxing environments, they’ll become a common first step in evaluating any new programs.

Best Wishes for a Prosperous New Year! From our family to yours, we send our best wishes for a prosperous New Year full of promise and success. Chris, Robyn, and the entire Texas I.T. Pros Family