IEEE says the most important technologies in 2022 will be AI/machine learning, cloud computing and 5G wireless. That comes in a new report published by the large technical professional organization titled "The Impact of Technology in 2022 and Beyond: an IEEE Global Study," based on an October survey of 350 chief information officers, chief technology officers and technology leaders from the U.S., U.K., China, India and Brazil who were asked about key technology trends, priorities and predictions for 2022 and beyond. "Among total respondents, more than one in five (21 percent) say AI and machine learning, cloud computing (20 percent), and 5G (17 percent) will be the most important technologies next year," IEEE said in a Nov. 18 announcement. "Because of the global pandemic, technology leaders surveyed said in 2021 they accelerated adoption of cloud computing (60 percent), AI and machine learning (51 percent), and 5G (46 percent), among others." The report includes respondent data for 12 questions, starting off with: "Which will be the most important technology in 2022?"

The foundational technology powering new AI coding assistants and other next-gen offerings based on natural language models is going to become an Azure cloud service. Microsoft announced the new Azure OpenAI Service during this week's Ignite 2021 tech event. It's based on GPT-3, an autoregressive language model that produces human-like text by leveraging deep learning, a machine learning construct that imitates the way people gain certain types of knowledge. GPT-3 comes from Microsoft partner OpenAI, an AI research and development company. The GPT-3 language model has been put to many uses, including no-code natural language software development in Power Apps, Microsoft's low-code development offering. Microsoft has a license to infuse GPT-3 technology into its products.

When clouds get hacked, it's often the fault of user misconfigurations. Just ask Amazon Web Services (AWs) about that. Beginning a few years ago or so, the AWS cloud notoriously suffered a long spate of such attacks, most of which leveraged misconfigured S3 storage buckets as attack vectors. Recently, Microsoft's Azure cloud experienced a similar situation, this one concerning misconfigurations from lazy users of the Kubeflow machine learning platform used with Kubernetes, the wildly popular container orchestration system. Hackers managed to exploit these misconfigurations to launch cryptocurrency mining campaigns leveraging powerful machine learning Kubernetes nodes, Microsoft announced earlier this month.

OpsRamp announced on Thursday the release of OpsRamp 5.0, which it describes as a "major update" to its flagship Software as a Service (SaaS) platform for multi-cloud environments. One of the main new upgrades in OpsRamp 5.0 is the addition of what the company calls the Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) inference engine, which is designed for "more powerful alerting and event correlation," the company says. As for why AI is so important to add now, especially for operations: "In today's world of alert floods from distributed IT assets, ops teams spend significant portions of their day just trying to figure out which alerts matter the most. Artificial intelligence can dramatically reduce this mundane-yet-critical work by recognizing patterns and context within the total infrastructure, and identifying where these alerts originate from," commented OpsRamp Vice President of Product Management Mahesh Ramachandran in an e-mailed statement. "The possibilities for reduced mean-time-to-resolution and increased business service uptime are incredible."