Markets and Trends

Top 10 Worldwide IT Industry 2021 Predictions

Explore IDC's top 10 predictions for the IT industry in 2021 and beyond, straight from the latest IDC FutureScape.
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This blog lists the top 10 worldwide predictions for the IT Industry. These technology predictions are meant to help the enterprise with strategic planning within a typical five-year business planning cycle.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted that the ability to rapidly adapt and respond to unplanned/unforeseen business disruptions will be a clearer determiner of success in our increasingly digitalized economy. A large percentage of a future enterprise’s revenue depends upon the responsiveness, scalability, and resiliency of its infrastructure, applications, and data resources.

As a result, the global economy remains on its way to its “digital destiny,” as most products and services are based on a digital delivery model or require digital augmentation to remain competitive. The majority, 65%, of global GDP will be digitalized by 2022, driving $6.8 trillion of IT spending from 2020 to 2023.

This means that CIOs are looking forward to their mid-term and long-term IT challenges, opportunities, and needs, and should know how the IT industry can support these needs.

IDC’s worldwide IT Industry 2021 top 10 predictions are:

  • Prediction 1: By the end of 2021, based on lessons learned, 80% of enterprises will put a mechanism in place to shift to cloud-centric infrastructure and applications twice as fast as before the pandemic.
  • Prediction 2: Through 2023, reactions to changed workforce and operations practices during the pandemic will be the dominant accelerators for 80% of edge-driven investments and business model changes in most industries.
  • Prediction 3: By 2023, 75% of G2000 companies will commit to providing technical parity to a workforce that is hybrid by design rather than by circumstance, enabling them to work together separately and in real time.
  • Prediction 4: Through 2023, coping with technical debt accumulated during the pandemic will shadow 70% of CIOs, causing financial stress, inertial drag on IT agility, and “forced march” migrations to the cloud.
  • Prediction 5: In 2022, enterprises focused on digital resiliency will adapt to disruption and extend services to respond to new conditions 50% faster than ones fixated on restoring existing business/IT resiliency levels.
  • Prediction 6: By 2023, an emerging cloud ecosystem for extending resource control and real-time analytics will be the underlying platform for all IT and business automation initiatives anywhere and everywhere.
  • Prediction 7: By 2023, driven by the goal to embed intelligence in products and services, one-quarter of G2000 companies will acquire at least one AI software start-up to ensure ownership of differentiated skills and IP.
  • Prediction 8: By 2024, 80% of enterprises will overhaul relationships with suppliers, providers, and partners to better execute digital strategies for ubiquitous deployment of resources and for autonomous IT operations.
  • Prediction 9: By 2025, 90% of G2000 companies will mandate reusable materials in IT hardware supply chains, carbon neutrality targets for providers’ facilities, and lower energy use as prerequisites for doing business.
  • Prediction 10: Through 2023, half of enterprises’ hybrid workforce and business automation efforts will be delayed or will fail outright due to underinvestment in building IT/Sec/DevOps teams with the right tools/skills.

Want to dive deeper into IDC’s IT Industry predictions? Explore the biggest takeaways and surprises from our FutureScape on our video series. Watch now:

Rick leads IDC's global cloud research team, driving the ongoing development of IDC's widely-used cloud services forecasts and the tracking of cloud services adoption. Over the past decade, he has been a keynote speaker at IDC's annual Directions conferences in the U.S., and in many other countries, as well as at CIO and Partner Summits and other major industry events. He regularly interacts with buy-side, sell-side and private equity financial analysts to discuss the implications of emerging ICT trends on leading ICT companies.