Cloud, Data Protection and Retail Tech Trends on the Rise in 2021

Industry leaders have given some insights on the 2021 trends for the emerging technologies of Retail, AI, Cloud and data protection. Following are the insights gathered by DQ Channels –

Cloud Industry

Talking about the Cloud industry, Srinivas Rao, Senior Director, System Engineering, Dell Technologies India said, “The pandemic has put us all into an Innovative mode. Businesses which were earlier reluctant to try out new technologies and work arrangements, have now started to rethink their strategy to innovate. They have realised the importance of investing in cloud services during current times and have expedited their adoption process, which would have otherwise taken many years to accomplish.”

Srinivas Rao elaborated further, “As we transition into a mode of recovery, we can expect a rise in the adoption of On-demand cloud services. Through this, organisations will be able to receive the benefits of cloud computing that will allow them to develop, manage and deliver applications while giving them control over their IT spending. We will also witness hybrid cloud computing taking the centre stage and providing consistent operations and infrastructure across multiple cloud environments.”

“We expect businesses to venture out and combine the services of IoT, Big Data and cloud computing to help make their business processes simpler, improve the quality of their outcome and maintain business continuity.”

-- Srinivas Rao, Sr. Director, System Engineering, Dell Technologies India

Data Protection Industry

When it comes to Cloud, then data protection is a related topic. Ripu Bajwa, Director & GM, Data Protection Solutions, Dell Technologies, India said, “This year has been difficult for organisations as well as individuals due to the massive disruption across all sectors. These challenging times have made us realise that digital transformation is no more an option, but a necessity, with most of the businesses transforming their operating models and opting for a remote working environment. It is encouraging to witness businesses transforming rapidly and adopting a digital strategy which would have otherwise taken months. However, simultaneously they need to ensure data security amidst the rising cyber threats that are hovering around their data storage 24x7.”

Ripu Bajwa continued, “As we enter the new year, organisations will not only need to manage their extensive workloads, but equally ensure that data flow is secured, without any security bug. Similarly, solution providers need to establish a channel to provide enhanced security to regulate the data traffic across multiple end points and offer the solutions as per customer' consumption needs and IT budget.

“Due to increased conversations around data privacy, organisations need to be extremely careful while managing the data of their customers and ensure that it’s not exposed to any malicious attack or breach.”

-- Ripu Bajwa, Director & GM, Data Protection Solutions, Dell Technologies, India

Retail Industry

AI is becoming very important in retail market. Sanjoy Roy, Co-founder & CEO, AskSid Technology Solutions said, “In the retail E-commerce context for example, a vertical AI solution that understands the retail domain ontology and that can be very easily trained on diverse sets of data (e.g., catalogue, images, orders etc.) is far likely to deliver improvement in conversions than a generic AI solution with models that lack any industry specialisation.

“AI solutions with a vertical industry focus will outpace general AI retail solutions in 2021 since these vertical AI solutions are easier to train and quicker to deploy. In 2021, will see NLP/ NLU technologies emerge as a game-changer in the way retail businesses get to know and understand their customer needs. However, this will be driven by NLU models that can understand natural language interactions with real customers and surface unique insights about customer needs that businesses might not be even aware of.”

-- Sanjoy Roy, Co-founder & CEO, AskSid Technology Solutions

Language technologies are becoming conversational tools in retail. Sanjoy Roy said about this, “In retail, owing to the pandemic, consumers have moved from offline to digital in a very big way and within digital again, the clear preference seems to be shopping via messaging apps. Technologies such as NLP and NLU (natural language processing/understanding) have enabled many retail brands to engage their consumers 24/7 via intelligent AI solutions but so far the application of NLP/ NLU has been largely towards customer service automation use cases.”

Thus, we can see that the IT partners, SMB owners and CXOs need to keep pace with the emerging technology solutions so that they can be ahead in 2021.