A faster and more secure 2021

Technology adoption for consumers and businesses has risen because of the pandemic and looks set to continue. Gordon Thomson, vice-president of technology acceleration for Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia at global technology firm Cisco, spoke to Business Day about trends during 2020 and, more importantly, those that may shape the year to come.

Technology adoption by consumers and businesses rose throughout 2020 due to the pandemic and looks set to continue.

Gordon Thomson, vicepresident of technology acceleration for Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia at global technology firm Cisco, spoke to Business Day about trends during 2020, and more importantly, those that may shape the year to come.

Based in Scotland, Thomson’s job is to advise companies on the type of technology and systems they need to invest in for the next 24 to 36 months.

What technologies do you think will shape our lives in 2021?

I’d like you to think about people in three different places: people who [predominantly] used to work in offices. People who are working but not in offices, that’s about 60% of the working population globally. Then we have to think about how technology can help society in general.

The first couple of technologies that are coming are around high-speed connectivity. Today we operate in a mobile world with 4G. We’re beginning to see mobile devices become 5G-enabled and the Wi-Fi technologies that we have are also aligning around similar speeds as 5G with something called Wi-Fi 6.

We’re getting to a place

where the consumption of technologies will be a hundred times faster than the technology consumption we have today.

You can take that into health care, using things like virtual reality for consultations. Consultations that went virtual globally in the last year was phenomenal, going up to 46% from about 11% previously.

5G and Wi-Fi 6, this really is the foundation to allow us to absorb any form of digitisation in any environment — socially, at home or in business. What is the second technology?

The second technology is sensors. We’re beginning to see sensors embedded in many different things we do. Sensors are going to have an impact in terms of helping people’s wellbeing and helping the sustainability of our businesses and employees.

Let me use a rugby example since both our countries are very passionate about it, though SA are much better than Scotland.

In the mouth guards of players, we’ve started embedding sensors to be able to tell whether players have been concussed.

This is the level of innovation that we can take out of simple day-to-day technology. Sensors are going to be used much more to protect the wellbeing of our employees and are also going to be used significantly in telehealth. The ability for us to be able to monitor the wellbeing of individuals, maybe somebody who lives at home on their own.

For the workplace: I’ve been working from home for nine months. My company doesn’t really know if I’m working in a healthy environment. That healthy environment should be around my ambient temperature, ambient lighting, how often I’m sitting at my desk, how often I’m moving about to make sure I stay active.

All of these sorts of technologies are being embedded into the PCs and the video technologies that we’re using, and they’re going to be embedded into offices as well. The third aspect?

The final area of where we’re moving to is a world of zero trust. Zero trust means that ultimately you don’t trust anybody. The technology doesn’t trust anybody and we have to go through a series of gates that allow us to gain access. Now, that is also going to take a biometrics view of the world to make sure that it is only you that gets access to the resources that you’re allowed to access.

The recent WhatsApp terms debacle has brought

privacy to the fore. How can businesses ensure privacy for their customers and employees?

Ultimately it comes with choice. The end user has to have the ability to choose.

In the working environment, the organisation has the ability to collect macro data. Rather than a particular employee not working in an environment that’s conducive to their wellbeing, you can create macro data without actually breaking privacy concerns.

So the organisation gets trending data. They get to see that 22% of their employees are working in environments that are not conducive. On that basis they can then start to push better learnings and other information out to the employees to watch the trend, hopefully improve that 22% to 18%, over time, and so on.

Though the organisation is collecting data, we can collect data in such a way that it isn’t specific to any one employee and we can still make use of that data.

In the social world that we operate in, personalised experiences are certainly something that every single one of us is going to want, especially as we engage digitally and even when we engage physically as well.

And I think we’ll see the cultural shift as people become more familiar with that fact and security becomes more robust.