This blog lists the top 10 worldwide predictions for Worldwide Mobility and Telecommunications. These technology predictions are meant to help the enterprise with strategic planning within a typical five-year business planning cycle.
Mobile and telecommunications technologies touch enterprise IT infrastructure and overall business operations in innumerable ways. Enterprise IT teams and technology decision makers must consider how these intersection points will affect strategy around new technology adoption such as 5G services, mobile security, edge computing, telco cloud-enabled services, and embedded security as well as the transformation of mobile workforces (and how they’re managed).
As mobile device and productivity use cases expand, the definition of “mobile worker” will grow to encompass devices beyond smartphones and tablets. Always Connected PCs as well as wearables and other smart connected devices will become part of the mobile worker’s “workspace.”
From a connectivity standpoint, enterprise IT teams should consider a future that will include 5G, but a path to get there that will be hybrid and multi-access by definition. As security challenges and the requirements for secure infrastructure grow exponentially, IT organizations must prepare for the infusion of security into processes outside of traditional IT security or infosec areas of responsibility. Preparing for this change will put an organization in a better position to adapt to the integration that is going on in the telco cloud and managed service provider realms.
As telco cloud operations adopt DevSecOps approaches and as security capabilities increasingly spread to more types of managed services and offerings, security domain knowledge and responsibility will fall to all aspects of technology-related business operations and responsibilities.
These predictions show what the impact will be to enterprises with regards to mobility and telecommunications sectors as they implement digital transformation (DX). The goal is to provide CIOs with the most important issues they should be considering as they chart their mobility and networking road map over the next several years.
This study provides guidance on the required investments in key areas such as edge computing, 5G, virtual networking, enterprise mobility and security services, and other services critical to implementing a digital infrastructure. This year’s telecom and mobility predictions are as follows:
The predictions from the IDC FutureScape for Worldwide Mobility and Telecommunications are:
- Prediction 1: Despite 5G’s substantial leap in performance and ability to enable advanced use cases, by 2023, only 30% of mobile network traffic will be carried by 5G.
- Prediction 2: By 2025, 50% of MNOs with active 5G deployments will leverage network slicing to offer secure and segmented 5G wireless connectivity for enterprise WANs as an attractive alternative to wireline virtual private networks (VPNs).
- Prediction 3: By 2023, 80% of global enterprises will have provisioned Always Connected PCs (ACPCs) to their employees.
- Prediction 4: By 2024, 75% of companies will leverage all four connectivity types (fixed, cellular, LPWAN, and Wi-Fi) throughout their daily functions, with cellular and LPWAN seeing the greatest increase in adoption.
- Prediction 5: By 2024, to serve diverse enterprise use cases with agility, 60% of carriers will have adopted the DevSecOps model for building and securing their networks and set up supporting teams and processes.
- Prediction 6: By 2023, edge computing/virtualization will have shifted the delivery of 50% of enterprise network services to a cloud-hosted, pay-per-use model improving QoS and accelerating deployment of new services.
- Prediction 7: By 2023, as privacy concerns become even more crucial, 45% of managed security service provider (SP) revenue will come from integrating security capabilities into other services such as cloud, connectivity, and IoT services.
- Prediction 8: By 2023, 80% of telecom operators will still struggle to deliver 5G and network slicing services because of the lagging capabilities of their operations and business management systems/processes.
- Prediction 9: By 2022, 75% of enterprise frontline workers will be enabled with mobile devices, apps, and connectivity services as part of a prioritized effort to increase the efficiency of task-oriented workflows.
- Prediction 10: By 2022, 60% of mobility management service providers will add PC endpoint device management capabilities, resulting in 70% of services customers moving to managed unified endpoint management (UEM) services.
For more context and deeper insights around these and any of our other worldwide technology predictions, click here to explore our IDC FutureScape Web Conferences.
You can find full context around these predictions in the newly published document, IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Mobility and Telecommunications 2020 Predictions (#US44576819) on www.idc.com.
