Workplace Technology will Embrace Open Source in 2021

Open source technology has been on a constant growth trajectory over the last few decades, with 77% of IT decision makers planning to implement enterprise software last year alone. The COVID-19 pandemic made open, cloud-based collaboration tools even more critical, especially as IT departments sought out scalable, transparent, and low cost options.

Here are some trends to watch in 2021:

Companies will look to make remote work sustainable and secure in the long term

With remote work becoming the mainstay of doing business, organizations will look to do even more to help their employees stay productive and engaged. .

To begin, management can work with ITOps to offer a mix of collaboration tools that support their employees’ success. These include things like video conferencing platforms, Google Drive, virtual whiteboards, and Slack. In addition, ITOps teams should regularly evaluate the performance of these tools to help employees maintain their productivity levels.

Enabling continued collaboration between engineering and operations in a remote environment is also important. To keep productivity up and prevent a barrier of separation, management should support DevOps teams by encouraging further investment in tools that help mimic working together in the same room. This can be done through video conferencing platforms and tools like Google Docs, SharePoint, online whiteboards, and collaboration tools like GitHub. The tremendous success of GitHub in the open source community – with its inherently distributed and asynchronous work processes – provides a proven template that is being adopted by leading, fast-moving companies.

Perhaps most important, leadership should pay attention to the health and well-being of all their employees. Successful companies will provide a framework of respect for the home situations of their employees and the resources to support them in a remote culture, such as wellness programs and online team activities that are just for fun.

Companies will revisit processes to ensure long-term remote success

At the start of the pandemic, there was a heavy focus on team collaboration tools such as those mentioned above. The next wave will include more formal collaboration tools, including e-signatures, approval workflows, HR workflows, and code reviews. We’ll also see the next level of staff enablement, with initiatives like electronic training and searchable knowledge bases. All processes that traditionally relied on ‘get up and ask somebody’ or ‘learn by looking over somebody’s shoulder’ need to be remote-enabled. People working on open source software projects have collaborated remotely for a very long time. Organizations should look to these communities for ideas about how to best structure remote teams, optimize communications and processes, and maintain transparency.

The role of security will be expanded to secure and protect the business assets on this new extended network which now includes the home, with all of its non-work gadgets, such as gaming systems, smart TVs, other personal PCs, and AI assistants. The fact that employees work on enterprise IP or customer data while connected to their home network presents IT with a whole new set of challenges.

Companies will look to migration factories and open source to make the shift to the cloud

The pandemic has shed a floodlight on the need for open source technologies as a critical part of operations. In 2021, organizations will embrace large-scale migrations of data centers and move their owned software to open source and the cloud. Additionally, this year we’ll see an increased number of businesses adopt “migration factories”. These factories address the whole technology stack, including the migration to Postgres as a foundation for the move to the cloud and refactoring of applications to adopt microservices. Migration away from legacy databases to Postgres open source is a fundamental first step as it reduces cost and opens up the opportunity to deploy on every cloud and every platform.

While 2020 was a year of immense change in all facets of life, 2021 will be the year that we become familiar with our new normal. Companies will more readily embrace cloud-based tech and open source technologies to ensure employee and business success.