Top Tech Trends and Predictions 2024 From Industry Insiders

What tech trends should we expect to make an impact in 2024? Nobody knows the answer to that better than those actually working in technology — they are the ones toiling to advance tech in their respective fields.

ITPro Today has gathered hundreds of predictions from IT leaders and industry insiders that organizations would be wise to consider before making any big tech decisions — as many of these contributors are working on tech from the trenches.

Predictions concerning the following topics have already been published as part of ITPro Today's 2024 prediction series:

Read on for more predictions from IT leaders and industry insiders in the following tech areas:

Storage
Observability
Quantum Computing
Sustainability
IT Operations & Management

What the Tech Industry Expects From Storage in 2024

In Terms of Storage, Simple Is Better

Chief technology officers and product teams will continue to simplify their storage infrastructure — with a focus on flash and object — by implementing fewer systems from different vendors. — Skip Levens, Media and Entertainment Marketing Director, Quantum

Data and Data Storage Strategies Will Be Reimagined

Data is everywhere, so enterprises need to radically rethink the underlying infrastructure supporting it. Datasets are too large, transfer costs are too great, and the potential misuse of data continues to expand. As a result, enterprises will take a new approach to sourcing, securing, transferring, and ensuring governance and compliance of the large-scale datasets needed to power future AI/ML applications. — Kevin Cochrane, CMO, Vultr

On-Prem Storage Is Having a Resurgence

Companies including Dell have heavily invested in their EMC portfolio. Enterprise customers will continue to recognize that enhancing on-premises storage hardware presents the faster path to mitigating rising cloud expenses. This modernization will allow companies to manage data gravity for on-premises data that cannot be easily relocated, ensuring a more efficient approach. — Justin Borgman, co-founder and CEO, Starburst

From Specialized Storage to Optimized Commodity Storage for AI Platform

The growth of AI workloads has driven the adoption of specialized high-performance computing (HPC) storage optimized for speed and throughput. But in 2024, we expect a shift toward commoditized storage. Cloud object stores, NVMe flash, and other storage solutions will be optimized for cost-efficient scalability. The high cost and complexity of specialized storage will give way to flexible, cheaper, easy-to-manage commodity storage tailored for AI needs, allowing more organizations to store and process data-intensive workloads using cost-effective solutions. — Haoyuan Li, Founder and CEO, Alluxio

What the Tech Industry Expects From Observability in 2024

Observability Will Grow in Importance

Observability will continue to rise in significance for enterprises, especially as emerging technologies further unlock its potential. With AI becoming more prevalent, observability will be a crucial component for successful business operations. The combination of observability and Unified SASE provides comprehensive analytics for a proactive approach to network performance and security. — Renuka Nadkarni, Chief Product Officer, Aryaka

Observability Shift and Where It's Going

Observability, characterized as a fusion of log analytics, monitoring, and APM, will continue to grow into a consolidated and expansive market. This is a pattern that echoes many enterprise software segments from enterprise applications to collaboration tools, and it is likely to reshape the segment as a whole. We'll continue to see legacy companies, burdened by outdated architectures, struggle to meet the demands of modern distributed applications. As a result, M&A of newer disruptive startups will increase but also, PE firms or strategic partners will step in to end dreams of innovation and growth and instead focus on maximizing cash flow from trapped customers. Funding of observability startups in 2024 will reach record levels with newer players building on modern architectures to handle the cost associated with massive growth in data volumes and C-level pressure to drive down incident resolution times and improve customer experience. — Jeremy Burton, CEO, Observe

Observability Is Recognized as a Data Problem

Despite pouring $17 billion into observability and monitoring tools each year, enterprises are seeing a negligible impact on mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) — in fact they are increasing. Why? Modern distributed applications are complex and change multiple times a day, which leads to DevOps teams seeing "unknown" problems in production every day. When troubleshooting an "unknown" problem, DevOps teams must triangulate on data points to determine where the problem may be occurring. That's where the problems start. Some data points are in a logging tool, a monitoring tool, or an APM tool. The best practice is often to screenshot what each tool is showing and post in a Slack channel so the final decision-maker can correlate. This is not sustainable. For observability to deliver on its promise, the observability data must be in one place — not in several siloes. If the data is in one place it's easier to navigate, find relevant context for the incident being investigated, and for the DevOps team to collaborate in one consistent interface (that's not Slack!). — Jeremy Burton, CEO, Observe

LLMs: The Second Coming of AI in Observability

In 2024, it will become apparent to almost everyone that LLMs/GPT deliver meaningful productivity improvements in the world of observability. From simple help to writing RegEx's and queries, LLMs and the friendly GPT interface will enable new users to get up to speed faster and resolve incidents faster than ever before. At the same time, AIOps (the first generation of AI) will continue to fall out of favor as those that implemented it realize that the promised benefits like root cause detection just aren't there. — Jeremy Burton, CEO, Observe

AI Will Impact Data Observability Vendors

In 2024, large enterprises will rapidly increase investment in AI and large language model (LLM) technologies. This will create a greater need for data observability to validate that data feeding AI initiatives is accurate and complete. As a result, data observability vendors will be expected to expand support from predominantly cloud-native data environments to larger, more traditional enterprise data stacks and provide native solutions for LLM data pipeline monitoring and validation. — Kyle Kirwan, co-founder and CEO, Bigeye

What the Tech Industry Expects From Quantum Computing in 2024

Advancing Quantum Computing Security Strategies

With the rapid progression of quantum computing and associated cybersecurity risks, we can expect to see a heightened focus on quantum-resistant cryptography, also referred to as post-quantum cryptography (PQC). PQC algorithms are designed to ensure that cryptographic systems can withstand quantum attacks. With the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) much-anticipated standardization of its first round of PQC algorithms in early 2024, we can also expect to see more organizations starting to develop their quantum security strategies. As a result, associated concepts such as crypto agility will also gain more attention over the next few years. Crypto agility refers to an information security system's ability to quickly adopt an alternative to its original encryption method or protocol without requiring a significant change to the system, its infrastructure, or connected systems, services, or applications. The next generation of IT/OT solutions must be crypto-agile to enable a successful transition from today's classical encryption to tomorrow's post-quantum cryptography. Being crypto-agile is also important because nobody can provide a 100% guarantee that their encryption algorithm, including NIST's new PQC algorithms, is unbreakable. — Dr. Torsten Staab, Principal Technical Fellow, Raytheon, an RTX business

In 2024, Industry Will Risk Falling Behind if It Neglects 'Early Quantum Adoption'

Like the rise of AI, new and powerful technologies such as quantum computing present a large unknown that looms over the security industry. The ambiguity of not knowing whether quantum will prove to be a greater threat than an asset exposes the sobering reality that even the most technical audiences have difficulty understanding how it works. To adequately prepare for the quantum evolution, the security industry must avoid the faulty position of waiting to see how others prepare. Instead, they must be early adopters of defensive protocols against quantum. — Jaya Baloo, CSO, Rapid7

Why You Shouldn't Expect Usable Quantum Computers in 2024

Quantum computing is still a long way off. A few people are kicking the tires and doing some experiments, but without several breakthroughs in fundamental physics, we won't have usable quantum computers in 2024. And maybe not in five or 10 years. There are two huge problems: quantum error correction and copying quantum data. Recently, there have been some claims of significant progress in error correction — if those claims pan out, that will be a huge step forward. The other problem is potentially bigger. With digital memory, if you want to move data, you run a wire from one bit to another. If the value is 0, you load a 0 into the bit at the other end of the wire. That doesn't work with qubits. You can run a wire — but as soon as you read the value of a qubit, you get a 0 or a 1, and that's not enough because qubits aren't just 0s and 1s. You don't get the qubit's quantum state, which is a superposition of 0 and 1. And if you can't move data around, you can't build computers bigger than a single chip. This really isn't a matter of "lots of smart people working on it will make progress." We need a better understanding about how the world works at a quantum level. Despite the NSA's work in developing standards, post-quantum cryptography is still very much a research topic, and will remain that way for the next year, at least. Given how long it takes to make changes like this, I agree that the time to put post-quantum cryptography in place is now, even though quantum computers are still a few years away. But we're still working through the algorithms and the implementations, and finding the vulnerabilities. — Mike Loukides, Vice President of Emerging Tech Content, O'Reilly Media

What the Tech Industry Expects From Sustainability in 2024

Digital Product Passport's Effect on Sustainability

The new "Digital Product Passport" will provide information about products' environmental sustainability. This information will be easily accessible by scanning a data carrier, and it will include attributes such as the durability and reparability, the recycled content, or the availability of spare parts of a product. It should help consumers and businesses make informed choices when purchasing products, facilitate repairs and recycling, and improve transparency about products' life cycle impacts on the environment. The product passport should also help public authorities better perform checks and controls. — Patrick Willemsen, Director Technical Community EMEA, Aras

Digital Transformation to Improve Oil & Gas Compliance

Digital transformation is an essential part of ensuring compliance with new regulatory requirements as well as transparent reporting of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) metrics for investors, employees, and consumers. While it may seem that sustainability sometimes takes a back seat to other initiatives, the ongoing digital transformation in the oil and gas industry provides a unique opportunity to integrate sustainability into the core of business operations. We're certainly seeing that more and more from our customers, and by leveraging digital technologies, companies not only drive innovation, efficiency, and gross, but also improve their environmental credentials. Transparency is key, and digital transformation supports that. — Alexandra Gajewski, SVP of International Products and Energy Transition, Quorum Software

Strategic Battery Replacements Will Slash E-Waste

Businesses will only replace batteries for devices when they actually need to be replaced. This will help companies stop spending unnecessary money and reduce the production of e-waste. — Shash Anand, SVP of Product Strategy, SOTI

Closing the Climate Reporting Gap

Only one-third of companies disclose quantitative or qualitative links between climate-related impact in their financial statements, suggesting that climate risk and impact is not being considered equally within financial performance. Similarly, nearly 70% of senior finance executives at enterprise organizations say that their teams are not fully prepared to track and measure the environmental impact of their leased and owned asset portfolios. Given the growing interest in ESG, as well as evolving environmental reporting requirements from various regulatory bodies, including the state of California and The International Sustainability Board (ISSB), this gap in financial reporting is extremely concerning. While we don't have a firm date for when the SEC will announce its official requirements, one thing is clear: Companies can get ahead of these regulations by getting a firm handle on the related data. Because nearly 40% of global carbon dioxide emissions originate from real estate-related assets, we expect to see finance leaders prioritize technology that supports united data views across all teams that handle leases and their related records. Doing so early on in 2024 will enable these organizations to centralize and analyze consumption data of greenhouse gas emissions and know that when it comes time for reporting, they are drawing from a complete and auditable view of their environmental impact. — Bill Harter, Principal Solutions Advisor, Visual Lease

Sustainability Is the New Efficiency Driver

The chase for environmentally friendly products is more than about saving Earth. It's about finding new markets and buyers that drive revenue growth while improving efficiency that delivers sustainable profit growth. — Dario Ambrosini, CMO, Propel Software

What the Tech Industry Expects From IT Operations & Management in 2024

Expect Significant Progress in AIOps in 2024

AIOps, in the truest sense, is currently more like a pipe dream or goal state for most companies. Right now, teams can't fully rely on automation to detect problems before they affect end users and take effective action in response to potential or early-stage incidents through automated rollbacks or automatic configuration changes. However, many engineering teams are already taking advantage of the evolving state of AIOps and applied intelligence — relying on AIOps to create and prioritize alerts, reduce alert noise, prioritize real issues with machine learning and advanced logic, identify the root cause of an issue faster, and more. I don't expect the industry to reach the dream state of AIOps in 2024; however, I think we'll see significant progress and investments in the AIOps space. In the not-too-distant future, an engineer is going to have the ability to respond to an incident, get a highly detailed summary — explaining what the problem is, if it's occurred before, if it appears to be novel, etc. — and gain solid suggestions on what they should do to remediate the issue, with specific suggestions like rolling back the deployment or updating the configuration. Plus, with the improvements to generative AI over the next few years, these suggestions could very well include the new code or the updated configuration itself. Even so, we won't be quite to the point where an Ops person is going to be able to just sleep through the incident, but the industry is heading in that direction. — Camden Swita, Senior Product Manager, New Relic

The Biggest Use Case for AI in Cloud Networking Is AIOps

The AI wave has arrived and is impacting every industry in several ways, raising the bar for speed and production in the enterprise. AIOps, which is the use of AI to automate and streamline IT operations tasks, is going to be the biggest use case for AI in the networking space in 2024. When it comes to networking, every capability needs to be tightly integrated, and AIOps makes meaning out of all the disparate information floating around. In particular, this is going to be critical for anomaly detection, which can help enterprises quickly identify the root cause of an incident, so they can resolve it before there's any damage to their network. Although AI will be a helpful tool for networking in 2024, we're still far from AI handling network provisioning on its own. Networks are mission-critical, so using AI to automate an entire network is still too risky, especially if you don't have the right personnel to monitor it and understand all the real-time decisions it's making. An enterprise can lose millions of dollars in an hour if they don't know where an issue happened. AI models will need to be trained for a long time for organizations to feel comfortable giving it more network responsibility. — Amir Khan, co-founder and CEO, and Atif Khan, co-founder and CTO, Alkira

In 2024, Tool Sprawl Will Start to Become a Thing of the Past

Companies often fall victim to employing an unnecessarily high number of IT tools, causing bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and negative ROI. Tech professionals are spending more time learning the intricacies of these tools than they are completing their actual work. Leaders need to mitigate this issue by consolidating their implementations — allowing for better manageability, efficiency, and security. With the constantly changing digital transformation, companies need to opt for a "best of suite" to ensure their employees can get to the real work that needs to be done. — Jaya Baloo, CSO, Rapid7

Digital Twins Will Improve IT Network Efficiency

In 2024, digital twins will be instrumental in predictive maintenance, network and systems design, and capacity planning. Organizations will invest in creating and managing digital twins of their IT networks to improve efficiency, ensure performance, manage change, and reduce costs. — Srinivasa Raghavan, Director of Product Management, ManageEngine

Digital Experience Monitoring Will Improve Online Experiences

In 2024, digital experience monitoring (DEM) will be crucial for businesses aiming to provide exceptional online experiences. Organizations will prioritize DEM tools and practices to identify and resolve performance issues, optimize user interfaces, and ultimately enhance customer satisfaction and retention. — Srinivasa Raghavan, Director of Product Management, ManageEngine

IT Leaders Will Focus on Value Creation

The key focus of IT leaders in 2024 will be value creation — exploring new and innovative technologies is an essential way to add value for customers and remain competitive, but an equally important part of this is tidying up the IT toolkit. — Jeremy Rafuse, VP and Head of Digital Workplace and IT, GoTo

Compute Power Is the New Oil

The soaring demand for GPUs has outpaced industrywide supply, making specialized compute with the right configuration a scarce resource. Compute power has now become the new oil, and organizations are wielding it as a competitive edge. In 2024, we anticipate even greater innovation and adoption of technologies to enhance compute efficiency and scale capacity as AI workloads continue to explode. In addition, specialized AI hardware, like TPUs, ASICs, FPGAs, and neuromorphic chips, will become more accessible. — Haoyuan Li, founder and CEO, Alluxio

To Meet Desired Customer Outcomes, the Larger Platform Play Will Gain Traction

In today's economy, it's no longer enough just to sell tools and solutions. Customers are increasingly demanding that vendors be able to demonstrate a stronger connection between their offerings and ROI. That will be the way to justify spending. As a result, more organizations will be moving away from an endless amount of point solutions to a platform approach. And that means vendors that only focus on one thing, or one point solution, will have more incentive to try to be acquired or expand into an all-encompassing platform through partnerships. — Rex Ahlstrom, CTO and VP of Innovation and Growth, Syniti

For more 2024 trends stories, check out the list below:

Do you agree or disagree with these tech predictions, or do you have some of your own that didn't make this list? Let us know in the Comments section below!

About the author

Rick Dagley is senior editor at ITPro Today, covering IT operations and management, cloud computing, edge computing, software development and IT careers. Previously, he was a longtime editor at PCWeek/eWEEK, with stints at Computer Design and Telecommunications magazines before that.