Business technology moves quickly and it can be difficult for businesses to keep up with IT and cloud industry trends. This is especially true if you have a small IT team. When they’re consistently busy tracking problems and fixing issues, it’s nearly impossible to research new trends, strategies, and technologies available.
But, falling behind on tech in IT and cloud can have a major negative impact on businesses because of how quickly things change. As technology evolves, your business needs to change with it and adopt new processes and systems to stay secure and optimized.
To help you prepare for 2023 and to keep your technology up to snuff, here are four of the must-know trends for the IT and cloud industry for next year.
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1. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) Adoption in Cloud Computing
As with many other technologies in business, AI and machine learning can be implemented to help analyze data, report findings, handle automated tasks, and more for businesses.
In 2023, AI and machine learning are expected to become a “must-have” for businesses hoping to innovate their data store. Adoption of this tech will rise steeply—as it has for many years now—with 87% of companies planning to use AI in some way.
Ways in which AI and ML in cloud computing can help businesses include:
- Leveraging Data: Using AI and machine learning in your cloud services helps you make better use of all that data. This technology can help you identify trends in data, pull relevant data for reporting, share data with appropriate teams within your organization, and learn how your business can best make use of different datasets.
- Intelligent Automation: Another use of AI and machine learning in the cloud is through intelligent automation that can complete tasks using human-written protocols, but can also work using established predictive algorithms to make analytical decisions without human input. This can help accelerate data analysis, eliminate human errors, identify useful trends, and eliminate many data-related, time-consuming tasks like input, analysis, and report building.
2. Data Security for the Cloud
Cybersecurity is a rapidly growing element of IT and data security for the cloud is extremely important in protecting data from the prying hands of cybercriminals who would hope to steal it for nefarious purposes.
Cloud cybersecurity tools like access controls, encryption, activity monitoring, and anti-virus software all help prevent cybercriminals from accessing and stealing data in different ways. For example, access controls help prevent unauthorized access that could lead to cybercrime and helps track down breaches by limiting who has the ability to access certain information. Encryption protects data while it’s stored by making it unreadable without a guarded key.
Each of these provides a unique layer of security that work together to protect data when being stored and transferred from the cloud.
3. Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Solutions
In order to improve flexibility, security, and to become more scalable, businesses are turning to hybrid and multi-cloud solutions for their cloud computing in 2023. This means diversifying their cloud services across multiple cloud providers (and, for hybrid cloud strategies, choosing both internal and external servers).
84% of companies will have adopted a multi-cloud strategy by the end of 2023.
Benefits of a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy include:
- Better Cloud Security: Compartmentalizing data ensures that one cloud breach doesn’t result in cybercriminals having access to all your data. Multiple clouds also protects from downtime because it creates natural redundancies which mean not all your data will become unreachable at the same time.
- More Flexibility: Having a foothold in multiple providers’ cloud systems means you have the flexibility to move data around to take advantage of pricing discrepancies.
- Protection From Change: Not having all your eggs in one basket (or one cloud provider, in this case) gives businesses some protection from the side effects of change. For example, if all of your data is built to be stored using cloud solutions such as AWS or Google Cloud—meaning you’ve built applications and systems around those platforms—a small change to the way those services operate could have a huge impact on your business data. Spreading data across multiple providers, or with your own internal cloud, softens this blow and protects you against the unknown.
One thing to be cautious of when implementing a multi-cloud strategy is ensuring you aren’t overcomplicating your processes or biting off more than your IT team can chew.
Make sure your business is ready for the extra work and challenges that a multi-cloud strategy can bring. This includes managing identity and access controls and streamlining processes for data collection and use so that your teams don’t have to jump around constantly to pull relevant information from multiple sources.
4. Defining and Building Digital Immune Systems
This one is not so self-explanatory. What is a digital immune system? According to business technology research firm, Gartner, it’s using technology, processes, and practices within a business to mitigate risks. In simpler terms, it means applying business technology in effective ways across your business in order to reduce bugs, downtime, security risks, and anything else that can have an adverse effect on business operations. In fact, Gartner predicts that companies can reduce downtime by up to 80% by adopting this technology mindset.
Gartner breaks it down even further by pointing out the six key prerequisites to a strong digital immune system:
- Software and Technology Observability: Building observability into your technology strategy provides your team with more information to use in optimizing how that technology is being used.
- Automated AI-Augmented Testing: Using AI, businesses can test software and technology automatically with fully-automated analysis and reporting, too.
- Chaos Engineering: This style of testing helps to uncover unknown and hard-to-find vulnerabilities and weaknesses in your technology system.
- Auto-Remediation: Automatically identify and correct issues in applications.
- Site Reliability Engineering: Establish this set of engineering principles and practices to improve customer experience and retention.
- Software Supply Chain Security: Avoid software supply chain attacks with more security functions to avoid third-party risks and to protect the integrity of your tech stack.
In Conclusion
2023 is shaping up to be another year of innovation for IT & Cloud. With these trends in your back pocket, you can start shaping your business’ strategy for the new year to ensure you’re working with the latest technology, strategies, and processes.
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