Sitting between what appears to be the tail end of a pandemic and the nose end of a recession, 2023 looks to be what the sports world would call a "rebuilding year" when it comes to tech infrastructure. Business complexity is increasing, the data explosion continues to intensify, tech layoffs have ramped up even as we still contend with a talent shortage and skills gap, and cyberattackers are outpacing cyberdefenders.
Happy new year, indeed.
In the face of these trends, what can IT decision makers expect? We reached out to some of TechBeacon's contributors from the past year to get their takes on what the new year will bring to the world of IT. Here's what they had to say:
Vendors will face increased pressure to adopt stronger security practices . . .
"In 2023, from a security standpoint, there will be a redefining of what is means to be a trusted partner. Organizations will need to continue to scrutinize the security posture of their vendors, suppliers, and partners that work as part of their supply chain. Not all partners are alike in implementing security strategies, frameworks, and audit controls. Companies will need to prove that they have implemented the latest technologies—and security-risk assessments and controls—augmented with continuous security audits to ensure that the data sharing and/or exchange are protected, continuously monitored, and tested. Moving into the new year, we will see more organizations adopting risk-management processes, verifying partners with user authentication and authorization and role-based controls, and ensuring that partners have conducted continuous network- and systems-vulnerability assessments, patch management, and penetration testing."
—Ihab Shraim, CTO, CSC Digital Brand Services
. . . partly because companies will be cash-strapped for direct cybersecurity spend.
"With the world recovering from the pandemic and going through economic uncertainties, businesses are prioritizing cost efficiencies and resource optimizations. That is leading to reduction of budgets for cybersecurity. Organizations are findings ways to automate processes with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), addressing skill scarcity and risk reduction while lowering the costs."
—Satyavathi Divadari, chief cyber security architect, CyberRes (a Micro Focus line of business)
Cloud evolution will take a back seat to cloud cost-optimization.
"In 2022, we saw that many enterprises were not getting the return on value that many thought that cloud computing would bring. Much of this was because of self-inflicted issues around rushing too fast into the cloud during the pandemic and skipping critical steps, such as application refactoring to leverage cloud-native features and be more cost-efficient. The result is grossly under-optimized cloud-computing solutions that are not able to deliver on the expected ROI. This includes the ability to provide scaling on-demand and business agility as promised and cloud costs that are in many instances twice what businesses expected. In 2023, it will be about building and rebuilding cloud-based systems for cost efficiency. This means leveraging better cloud operations (CloudOps) and tooling, deploying financial operations (FinOps) programs, and reevaluating anything that moved [into] the cloud for potential optimization and modernization. This means that many enterprises will stand still in their evolution to public-cloud providers while spending as much or more on cloud-computing services and technology to retroactively fix avoidable issues."
—David Linthicum, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting
Tight budgets will also compel software democratization.
"This year is going to be a time for businesses to declutter and streamline their operations. With the economic slowdown and funding crunch, it's more important than ever they make sure they're using the right technology to support their business goals. Enterprises should look for solutions that offer more customization and value for the money and reconsider some of the large, inflexible systems that have high maintenance costs. At the same time, businesses will start to see a greater shift toward democratizing technology, with tools that can be used by professionals and all users."
—Suresh Sambandam, CEO, Kissflow
Meanwhile, data democratization will hit senior management.
"Data is no longer a bastion of IT teams, solely owned and controlled by data scientists and analysts. As the status quo evolves, business leaders will become more data-literate, and, likewise, people deep in the 'data trenches' will better understand how and why data must be presented to make decisions. Technology that breaks down silos and unifies the entire data value chain from engineering to insights will underpin this critical meeting of the minds."
—Tarunya Suresh, head of marketing and demand generation, LatentView Analytics
Exploding data growth will drive tech firms toward AI/ML innovation.
"IDC has predicted that this year we will generate 118 zettabytes across the consumer and commercial sectors. Yet that data comes in so many forms across so many media that it remains a challenge to throw a net over it all and to understand it. Using AI/ML and related innovations, tech providers will continue to evolve their offerings to handle the challenges of data variance, location, diversity, capture, security, understanding, analysis, and management. The smartest enterprises will need to find innovative and scalable ways to surf the zettabyte tsunami."
—Derek Britton, director of communications and brand strategy, Micro Focus
AI/ML innovation will make data management a priority.
"The imperative for enterprises this year is getting their data and data infrastructure ready for the AI age. The current buzz around new generative AI technologies such as OpenAI's ChatGPT is the future; these innovations will change forever the way we create content, solve problems, make decisions, and collaborate in the future. ML models require massive amounts of data to produce accurate, relevant results in these new tools—but this data is often hidden in application and storage silos or lacking the context needed to push it to the right platforms at the right time. The year 2023 will see an insatiable demand to organize, search, tag and intelligently manage the massive volumes of unstructured data volumes collected at the edge, stored in multiple clouds and on-premises data centers. Organizations that can do this in a way that is also sustainable and cost-effective will gain a measurable competitive advantage."
—Krishna Subramanian, COO, president, and co-founder, Komprise
The Los Angeles Dodgers will win the World Series.
This has nothing to do with enterprise IT. I'm just bullish on J.D. Martinez and Max Muncy.
—Joe Stanganelli, assistant managing editor, TechBeacon
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