Welp, 2021 didn’t turn out to be the year of re-emergence and freedom from COVID-19 that we all hoped it would be. It did, however, highlight the importance of the technologies we cover here at SDxCentral — security, networking, cloud, and 5G, among them — and advance adoption much quicker than a “normal,” non-pandemic year probably would have.

And it also paved the way for more emerging technologies to take hold in 2022.

As we wrap up 2021, our editors dove deep into a handful of these technologies to separate the hype from the reality. We looked at the benefits of adoption and what challenges organizations face in implementation, as well as how these technologies will likely shape 2022 and beyond.

While vendors and enterprises alike have paid lip service to DevSecOps for years, it finally looks poised for prime time. I believe it’s going to take off in 2022 as more companies automate security tools and integrate those into the development lifecycle.

Meanwhile my colleague Matt Kapko tackles “overhyped” open radio access network (RAN) architecture. “In theory, open RAN enjoys broad support,” he wrote. “In practice, it remains rare.”

However, he’s witnessed a change in attitudes, which is pulling adoption along, too: “Although specifications are still and will likely remain under development for the foreseeable future, many industry heavyweights and observers now view the shift to open, disaggregated architecture as irreversible.”

While I remain convinced that a robot apocalypse is inevitable and we are all doomed, Tobias Mann makes a convincing case for computers that work more like our brains. This is called neuromorphic computing.

“Several large chipmakers, including IBM and Intel, believe the technology could enable real-time training on sparse datasets all while consuming a fraction of the power of traditional compute architectures,” he wrote.

Some with a glass-half-full outlook on life would say that 2022 collectively taught us to embrace chaos. Or, as Nancy Liu wrote: “Sometimes we need to break things first to secure them.”

That’s the idea behind chaos engineering. And as hyperscalers and startups alike embrace chaos open source projects and roll out chaos-as-a-service products, organizations will likely become more willing to unleash chaos on their IT infrastructure.

Finally, as circular economy climbs up the corporate buzzword ladder, Emma Chervek took a look at how this model could provide not only environmental but also financial and supply-chain benefits. “But successful adoption of a circular economy hinges on a shift to a fundamentally new way of thinking,” she wrote.

We are all here for that new way of thinking, and hopefully you all can embrace it — and some of these other newer technologies — in 2022 and beyond. As always, you can read all the stories in our editorial series at SDxCentral. And we’d love to hear what emerging technologies (or types of bubbly) you’re planning to dive into on Jan. 1.