Five Important IT And Security Trends For 2023

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Although some of the worst disruption caused by the global Covid-19 pandemic is hopefully behind us, 2023 is shaping up to be another challenging year for business and society.

It looks certain that inflation will continue to be high, and recessions are once again threatening economies across the EMEA region. At the same time, organizations find themselves compelled to cope with the accelerated rate at which digital transformation is taking place or risk being left behind. This is compounded by the fact that organizations are currently experiencing a huge shortage of workers with the skills needed to take advantage of this technical revolution and dealing with the impact of societal factors such as the "great resignation" and "quiet quitting."

All of this, and we haven't yet mentioned the issue of sustainability and climate change – probably the biggest problem humans have ever faced!

What’s becoming increasingly clear is that in order to prosper or even survive in this situation, businesses and organizations will need to walk a tightrope between careful cost-cutting and spending where it is necessary.

To assist with this, data-platform provider Splunk has produced a series of predictions and forecasts for the year ahead. I spent some time going over them and also caught up with their EMEA SVP and general manager, Petra Jenner, to discuss how she sees things playing out across the region.

Resilience

One issue we are both strongly in agreement on is that resilience will be the key trend across all industries for the coming year.

Jenner tells me, "Right now, all the economic factors, except employment, point towards recession."

This means that it’s most likely that investment will be focused on areas where it’s essential to survival or maintaining critical infrastructure rather than speculative or forward-looking strategies.

As far as data strategies are concerned, there’s growing reason to believe that laws and governance issues around privacy and data protection are only going to become more stringent. This means that preparing for these changes becomes an issue of resilience, too – prompting companies to implement their own regulations and oversight procedures in anticipation of forthcoming changes.

In many ways, resilience – in this context – touches on most of the other big trends that are going to be at the forefront of business strategy in 2023. Obviously, this includes security, but it also involves skilling and tooling organizations to deal with critical issues such as the skills shortage as well as the fast-changing world of work. This means augmented working via artificial intelligence and machine learning. It also includes overhauling IT infrastructure to reduce legacy costs and optimizing application performance to ensure customers aren’t lost due to poor experience. In turbulent times – as 2023 looks set to be - resilience is perhaps the most important trend of them all.

The Future of Work

Work is changing in many ways – including the exodus from centralized offices to work-from-home, remote and hybrid arrangements to a growing dependency on tools and technologies to get our jobs done.

Jenner tells me that 2023 will be marked not just by the ongoing "great resignation" but by a parallel "great renegotiation." This renegotiation will be focused on contracts, leaving larger organizations, in particular, facing the tricky challenge of retaining their most productive and valuable staff. On top of that, younger workers are increasingly "vision driven", meaning they want to be a part of organizations where environmental and social governance (ESG) goals are truly baked into business objectives rather than a box-ticking exercise or something that is not fully embraced.

The skills shortage will continue to prove highly challenging, particularly when it comes to recruiting and retaining IT and cyber security professionals.

Jenner says, "I think we still have that phase where many employees are either ‘quiet-quitting’, or renegotiating contracts … that’s not likely to change in the next 12 months. Workers … expect change; they are much more outspoken about their requirements and what they expect from companies. It's a huge challenge for any organization to retain the most valuable people, and that's something that will not change."

AI and ML

Artificial intelligence (AI) – specifically machine learning (ML) is the driving force behind automation and the "intelligent revolution." Along with data and an appropriately skilled workforce, it is the key to enabling companies to better understand their customers, develop products and services that are more in line with their needs, and streamline internal operations to cut waste and increase efficiency.

In the coming year, Splunk predicts, one application of ML, in particular, is going to drive transformation exponentially – large-language models. These generative AI models power chatbots that are increasingly able to hold conversations at near-human level and even create computer code from scratch. Yes, as far-fetched as it sounds, we are standing at the dawn of the era where computers will learn to program themselves!

Advances like this are already available for anyone to use in tools like Github Co-Pilot (based on the GPT-3 large language model), OpenAI Codex, and Google's Alpha Code.

While, as their name suggests, these language processing abilities rely on models that are very big (in terms of data) and therefore difficult for individual smaller organizations to build and train, 2023 will be marked by an increasing level of access to the technology via as-a-service providers.

Metaverse

Metaverse is a controversial concept as we head into 2023. This is largely because so much has been said and written about it (not to mention spent on it) without – as far as most people can see – much to show for it. My own take is that it is something of a catch-all term for the “next generation” of online experience, as well as a number of key technologies, including virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), that will eventually help to deliver it.

As Splunk Chief Strategy Officer Ammar Maraqa puts it, “There is a lot of investment happening in this area by the major tech firms, but they are still inventing the building blocks.”

2023 will undoubtedly give us advances in these building block technologies. Many of these will be driven by gaming and entertainment, where audiences are most receptive to new tech-driven experiences, and immersion and interactivity are key trends in their own right. However, the technology will also become increasingly used by brands as a marketing channel of communication and engagement with customers, as well as by businesses looking for new tools and technologies that can be put to use by remote teams.

Security

Ransomware, cybercrime-as-a-service, the potential disruptive criminal uses of deepfake technology, and the dual nature of ML from a cybersecurity perspective are all prominent blips on the radar of cybersecurity professionals for 2023, according to Splunk’s report.

Of course, as mentioned above, security is a key element of resilience – the biggest overarching tech trend for 2023. Under its umbrella falls all the areas of responsibility around preventing and protecting against direct cyber attacks orchestrated by malicious individuals, organizations, or even nation-states. However, just as crucially, it covers mitigating the risks posed by clumsy, forgetful, or just plain lazy "friendlies" who may unwittingly disclose passwords, ignore advice to apply essential security updates, or leave sensitive data lying around in places where they shouldn’t!

On the correlation between security and resilience, Splunk's EMEA chief technical adviser Mark Woods says, "In Europe, we see financial services firms appointing very senior execs with resilience portfolios. Most often, they're thrown into the security organization because in most organizations, the only people who know how to do robust monitoring properly are security.”

This means that, more than ever before, cybersecurity in 2023 becomes a holistic process involving developing an organization-wide understanding of how aspects of security and resilience work together to expose organizations to risk or, hopefully, provide protection from risk.

As Patrick Coughlin, VP of GTM Strategy and Specialization, puts it, "An incident is an incident, whether you’re talking about an infrastructure layer failure, a performance issue in an application, a service outage, an insider threat or an external threat actor.”

Developing the capability to respond to any of this in a holistic way requires developing organization-wide awareness of security and resilience issues. This means that in 2023 we see cybersecurity become a topic not just for the IT department but for the boardroom as well as the shop floor.

You can download the full predictions reports here: https://lnkd.in/ewnpT2Yn

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About Bernard Marr

Bernard Marr is a world-renowned futurist, influencer and thought leader in the field of business and technology. He is the author of?21 best-selling books?(and winner of the?2022 Business Book of the Year?award), writes a regular column for Forbes and advises and coaches many of the world’s best-known organisations. He has over 2 million social media followers, over 1.2 million newsletter subscribers and was ranked by LinkedIn as one of the top 5 business influencers in the world and the No 1 influencer in the UK.