Technology Forecast: Top 5 Tech Issues in 2019

As the new 2019 unwinds, there are certain tech issues that will be a priority for resolution. Last year was a rather bad one for tech and some people are concerned that 2019 will be no better.

What we can say is that the state of the technological future depends greatly on whether the issues described below will be successfully resolved.

1. Cybersecurity

This is a big one. In 2018, there were quite a few huge hacks: Quora, Facebook, and Marriott, to name a few. In the case of the last one, the data of approximately 500 million users were exposed – how bad does that sound?

There is a controversy about the state of cybersecurity. Some claim that companies need to have stricter punishments for breaches and that they should implement better security practices. However, as one of the engineers from Silicon Valley says, Google and Facebook have some of the best security teams in the world. So how can the problem of cybersecurity be fixed?

In its report, Wipro names machine learning and AI and security design and architecture to be the top two security competencies for the upcoming years. Additionally, the company emphasized the importance of focusing on the following areas of cybersecurity: 

All these steps together will be able to enhance security, thwart hacking attempts, and help companies develop a better security strategy to protect the data and its users.

2. Technology and Jobs

Another big concern is about technologies replacing people and eliminating jobs.

The biggest question is: will AI indeed take away jobs, leaving hundreds of people jobless? Work automation is estimated to threaten about 800 million jobs – but in return, it will create even more.

The main point to keep in mind is that technology will replace tasks, but not the actual jobs. The development of technology is aimed at improving the work processes and making them more accurate, faster, and hassle-free. 

While technologies can replace people who are doing mundane jobs, they also give the opportunity to learn new skills and apply them in the new digitized environment. So the invasion of technology can be seen as a chance to re-organize the work processes and assign human talents to more sophisticated and complex tasks.

3. Cryptocurrency

In 2019, we will see more cryptocurrency and it will strengthen its presence.

Overall, this year seems to be a promising one in terms of cryptocurrency. First, we now observe a combination of decreasing prices and strengthened fundamentals, which is beneficial for those who want to increase their crypto holdings. Secondly, cryptocurrency becomes more widespread as a payment method, with some of the e-commerce stores listing it alongside credit cards or PayPal.

There are some constraints that cryptocurrency now struggles to resolve and 2019 expects many exciting projects related to this issue. For example, the Bitcoin blockchain can currently handle only 7 transactions per second – but there is an ongoing Lightning Network project that claims to eliminate this issue and leverage the Bitcoin blockchain performance.

4. Privacy

The issue of privacy relates to the cybersecurity issue described above.

In 2018, the European Union introduced GDPR, which stands for “General Data Protection Regulation.” Among the others, one of its statements claims that every person has a right to require justification for a certain decision by a company – and that became quite a challenge for the financial companies that use AI and ML for credit scoring, as an example. 

In 2019, companies will continue to work with this regulation and its interpretation. Additionally, tech engineers will work hard on improving the AI-based techniques to create better security and data protection algorithms and keep the user data encrypted.

5. Customer-Centric Development

The development of cloud gaming, the growing invasion of technologies into diverse industries (like retail or healthcare), mobile payments – all these are indicators that technological development is aimed at the satisfaction of the customers’ demands towards the quality and speed of service.

The rise of mobile and global digitization led to a fact that modern users expect every service and product to be delivered within seconds while retaining excellent quality. This means a huge field of opportunities for savvy tech companies to come up with innovative solutions to automate, ease, or quicken an existing but outdated process to make it more customer-friendly.

Bonus: Mobile Development

We should also add that 2019 will be busy for app development companies as well. As mobile comes forward, more and more companies will request that development companies create a stellar mobile app for their business.

This is needed because modern customers use their mobile devices as a primary source of searching for information, products, and services. Mobile is becoming the center of almost all financial transactions and daily operations so service providers have to keep up with the demand.