Atlassian Experts Make Technology Predictions for 2022 and Beyond 

Sri Viswanath, CTO, Atlassian

• Over the next 5 years, Web 3.0 will upend the way we think about application development. Where Web 1.0 was the era of internet protocols, Web 2.0 is our current state of applications and generated content. Web 3.0 will rise as a result of the cracks in the current system, which puts user data in the hands of social media giants. Powered by blockchain technology, this new version of the web will usher in a decentralized internet and put data ownership back in the hands of the user. For the industry, it will completely change the way we approach application development and privacy.

• Every business unit in an Enterprise will operate in an agile fashion with their dedicated IT partner, changing the way business units transform and build new capabilities. With IT now sitting at the center of business, these teams will only grow in size and partner with more departments to deliver long-term business value. The success of each service they provide will now be measured by outcomes, instead of output, and require them to move from a project- to product-based operating model.
• Employee engagement and burnout prevention will remain at the top of the agenda for IT. Distributed work, competition for talent, and increasing levels of burnout will drive IT leaders to invest in building a world-class, digital employee experience. This will include the adoption of more asynchronous collaboration tools, having all employees on the same cloud platform, and making information across the business more open.

• More empathy, not technical skills, is key to building resilience in 2022. We’ll begin to realize that security is not just a technical problem; It’s an organizational and human problem. As an industry, we’ve learned that it’s not enough to mandate security protocols and increase training. Instead, security teams will need to exercise empathy in order to better understand developers’ top concerns and motivating factors. For example, you will have far more resilient systems if your development environment includes a strong incentive structure or removes friction for developers to perform security testing and make security improvements.
• The lines between security, engineering, trust, privacy and compliance in an organization will disappear. Information privacy and compliance are now top priorities for customers in the era of cloud and distributed systems. CISOs and CSOs at global companies will be expected to lead on a proactive approach in getting ahead of rising regulatory policies and rethinking user privacy. As was the case with Atlassian, this will likely result in simplifying organizational structures to remove collaboration barriers between these interconnected teams.
• As cloud adoption outpaces on-premise growth, distributed architecture will become table-stakes for security strategies. The adoption of cloud is accelerating and will soon eclipse on-premise growth. What this means for security teams is that they’ll need to look ahead and eliminate lateral movement by moving to an architecture that’s broadly distributed and primarily consists of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.