2023 Tech Predictions

2023 Tech Predictions – Industry leaders provide their expert insights

December 9, 2022 Reactions

It’s that time of year where the technology industry gets out its crystal ball and makes its 2023 tech predictions. We’ll be publishing some long-form pieces but, in this (regularly updated) post, anyone can comment on any particular issue. Newest posts are at the top.

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Table of Contents

Keir Garrett – Vice President at Cloudera ANZ

Businesses across industries are in the process of realising their digital transformation efforts and looking to further mobilise emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning for improved operational efficiencies and cost reduction. According to IDC, Australia’s spending on AI systems will reach $3.6 billion by 2025, further representing a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.4% from 2020 to 2025. The continued evolution of AI and machine learning algorithms has driven the adoption of machine learning and processing. From financial institutions to telecommunications, manufacturers to retail, we are seeing organisations leverage these technologies in innovative ways that transform the business.

As more industries mature digitally and widely adopt these technologies, 2023 will be a pivotal year for organisations looking to deploy emerging tech solutions across business functions. Here are four key trends that will likely dominate business priorities in the coming year.

Treating data as a strategic business asset

Recent years have seen organisations generating unprecedented volumes of data as a by-product of their digitalisation activities and increasing digital customer touch points. This is especially so in industries like telecom, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, insurance, and financial services industries. And with the anticipated deployment of 5G networks across the region, this volume of data will increase significantly.

Cloudera - Keir Garrett 2023 tech predictions
Cloudera’s Keir Garrett gives her 2023 tech predictions.

Across Australia and New Zealand, we have observed that organisations are doing, or aiming to do, more with their data, and reduce the time to value. Data contains valuable insights for critical business decision-making and the most innovative and successful organisations recognise data as a strategic resource that demands its own strategy. How this strategy looks depends on the organisation’s unique business needs as one affects the other. There is no one size fits all approach; the strategy must continue evolving with the business’s priorities.

What is certain is that having an enterprise data strategy aligned to the organisation’s cloud strategy and business priorities will help the organisation drive greater business value by improving operational efficiencies and unlocking new revenue streams. According to findings from the Enterprise Data Maturity research, 5.97% of enterprises in Australia and New Zealand with mature data strategies of more than a year report achieving higher profit growth. The research also found that 71% of Australian businesses have yet to democratise access to centralised analytics tools and support, making it challenging for business divisions to collaborate.

With the right tools in place, distilling actionable insights from data to achieve business objectives or unlock new revenue streams is easily achievable for organisations of all sizes across industries, especially with the availability of self-serve functionalities that does not require specialised ops or cloud expertise.

Operationalising adaptive AI systems for quicker business decision-making

With the increase in demand for real-time data processing, streaming, and sharing to power organisations transform into data-driven organisations, we anticipate more businesses investing in building adaptive AI systems that can ingest large amounts of data at frequent intervals and adapt to changes and variances quickly.

What will determine the winners from the laggards will hinge on the speed at which predictive analytics can be executed, and the cost-benefit ratio related to these algorithmic paradigms. An organisation’s ability to create trust with usable and explainable AI for faster and flexible decisions will separate the leaders from the pack.

We foresee organisations pivoting focus beyond the algorithm to things like business-ready predictive dashboards, visualisations, and applications that simplify the use of AI systems to reach conclusions. These will help business leads quickly understand the impact to their business and act with confidence.

We have been working with ANZ organisations to operationalise data analytics and AI solutions to unlock data-driven decision making and operational efficiency, with them quickly seeing distinct business benefits. For example, Deakin University uses analytics to improve its teaching and learning experiences with real-time insights into student learning patterns as well as various data sources for a more personalised support to its 60,000 students. Through the Cloudera Data Platform, Deakin ingests and processes more than 8.8 million data events per day from disparate systems, including learning management, registrar, administration and occupancy analytics.

Continued move to the public cloud and hybrid cloud, optimising deployments

Public cloud spend and workload volumes continue to accelerate for organisations of all sizes as cloud-first policies and cloud migration remain top of the agenda for senior IT leaders. However, a significant amount of this spend is wasted as organisations struggle to optimise costs effectively.

According to Flexera’s 2022 State of the Cloud Report, respondents self-estimated that their organisations waste 32% of cloud spend in 2021, up from 30% the previous year. As cost optimisation remains the top cloud initiative for organisations for the sixth year running, we will likely see organisations opt for more cost-effective strategies to deliver results quickly and efficiently, including:

  • Migrating more workloads to the cloud to free up resources while driving agility
  • Implementing data and analytics solutions that can manage the end-to-end data lifecycle – from ingesting data from multiple sources to storing, processing, serving, analysing and modeling it to drive actionable insights
  • Repatriating some machine learning workflows back on-premise, where complex processes are more cost effective, to optimise cloud spend for compliance, governance and security

This is where leveraging modern data architectures like data lakehouse, data fabric and data mesh is essential to driving business efficiencies across diverse operations. In addition to managing data on-premises and in public or private clouds, these modern data architectures are also intrinsically designed to handle complexities such as security and governance related issues. They also address the concerns of IT teams in allowing access to organisational data.

Organisations can consider moving to hybrid data platforms that can manage the entire life cycle of data analytics and machine learning. The platforms must have features of openness and interoperability that allows ease of sharing and enables self-serve functionality, such as the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) which has a built-in shared data experience (SDX) feature. These features provide businesses with a common metadata, security, and governance model across all their data.

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Leveraging SaaS solutions to address business challenges

As organisations optimise cloud usage as a cost-control measure and continue migration of workloads to the cloud, the costs to manage, maintain, and operate traditional data centers will be reduced. In addition, lesser assets, including labor resources, will be required to oversee the data center, freeing them up to focus on further efforts to innovate the business. This is crucial during the tight labor market that we are facing now. 

The right SaaS solution will provide access to the technologies that businesses need to innovate, alongside scalability and flexibility that is required to remain resilient through these turbulent and ever-changing times.

As talent resources remain tight in the anticipated economic slowdown, we expect this to drive more demand for IT outsourcing services and SaaS solutions to address cloud, security and big data skills shortages. This is where initiatives like Cloudera’s partnership with Generation is crucial in bridging the talent gap – by improving access to digital skills, mentorship and learning resources, and transforming education to employment opportunities.

Overall, organisations across Australia and New Zealand need to take the time to evaluate their business processes before embracing cloud, edge, and data capabilities. It is crucial to determine the approach and strategies that best fit the unique needs of their business, where these capabilities are a means of benefiting the entire organisation and not just to solve specific problems.

Nathan Knight – VP and MD at Hitachi Vantara ANZ

Increased investment in Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Businesses need to make sure they are spending effectively, and they don’t have access to or perhaps even a desire to fulfill every technical capability in-house. There will be a continued increase in investment in IaaS models.

Nathan Knight - VP and MD at Hitachi Vantara ANZ
Nathan Knight gives his 2023 tech predictions.
Focus on Intelligent, cyber-resilient Infrastructure

More IT operations will be automated using AI / AIOps. Our infrastructure customers talk about the need to make infrastructure invisible. They want to automate it to make it more self-driving and self-healing. More organisations will deliver on the vision of self-driving infrastructure through a robust data management program, combining real time data collection and AI / ML powered analytics.

Not only that, and especially since enhanced cyber security is a prime focus for the Australian public and private sectors, IT decision-makers will prioritise infrastructure solutions with built-in, predictive cyber-resiliency capabilities. Organisations will improve and modernise their ability to recover at speed after an attack.

Uptake of infrastructure with AI enabled automation built in

This is the future of IT infrastructure. The intelligence built into the infrastructure layer and the underlying platforms extends to AI enabled automation. This will be increasingly attractive to organisations looking for optimisation around performance, cost and security, and to reduce the need for their IT people to perform tasks that can be intelligently automated.

Data will continue to shift from centralised analytics to localised analytics

A continuation of the trend to make use of data where it is rather than migrating it to another place in your IT ecosystem in order to perform analytics. Data integration, preparation, discovery and governance are becoming increasingly critical as data is coming in from many different sources.

Application & data requirements will demand infrastructure that can facilitate data transfer between on premise and hyperscalers

IT and OT will continue to converge and DataOps serve more interconnected applications, devices, algorithms and machine learning models that drive digital experiences. Business applications will increasingly require critical operational and governed data transfer between cloud providers, service providers, technology partners. Infrastructure cannot be siloed. Organisations will be looking to ensure their infrastructure can view and manage data across the increasingly distributed IT environment.

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Unruly Data Lakes must be addressed

This is a challenge that could keep CIOs and CDOs up at night and relief will be found in AI-enabled meta tagging. The reality is 87% of data science projects never make it into production and the majority of data lakes have become unmanaged and ungoverned. We’ve seen AI-enabled meta tagging be a quick solution to sorting through data. Based on what we’ve seen with our customers, by using AI techniques to dynamically tag substantial amounts of complex data companies can accelerate their ability to glean insights by as much as 300%.

Classifying the data that is stored, and then doing more with it than simply storing it

We will see an increase in data intelligence and the ability to rationalise data. We will see an increase in the realisation that data must be stored along with the metadata that identifies what that data is, so that it can be classified, protected, handled properly and actually put to good use. Until very recently, data storage has been centred around storing data and doing it well (good data reduction techniques, etc.). In the year ahead, Hitachi Vantara is focused on leveraging advanced operational analytics capabilities to increase data optimisation. Having the ability to understand the data that is being stored is a significant challenge, but it will be accomplished with a combination of analytics and what we’ve been able to deliver on the data storage spectrum.

Investment in infrastructure that supports doing more with data, faster

The focus on doing more with data will see increased adoption of AI and ML and require more complex algorithms working with complex, dispersed data sets. Yet there will be no reprieve in terms of the expectation of speed. To deliver on the desire for faster insights against complex data sets, organisations need to future proof any new technology they invest in and that will include heterogeneous compute technologies to underpin these advance analytics capabilities.

Cloud and network convergence will force a rethinking of IT architectures…

Especially at the edge and for mobile environments where IT meets the physical world. The explosive growth of edge data, driven by IIoT adoption and 5G, will allow companies to quickly process and analyse data where it lives and where quick responses are required.

Increased reliance on sovereign clouds

Amidst increased data sharing, delivery of advanced insights across distributed networks, and enhanced cybersecurity, the public and private sector will leverage sovereign clouds for the very benefits they provide around security and regulatory compliance.

Private 5G networks in industrial settings will begin delivering on the promises of device connectivity, machine reconfigurability and real-time data analysis

Increased use of private 5G will enable troves of new connected devices, collecting more data at the edge than ever before, in addition to a broader adoption of IIoT-enabled solutions in 2023.

Digital solutions and data-driven processes will become intrinsically important to achieving corporate sustainability goals, by tracking and visualising progress in a more automated way

Ambitious sustainability goals will only be met by companies that embed these goals in their offerings and can digitalise their processes to address sustainability, while balancing the pressure to show immediate action and business results. Sustainability is becoming an important requirement not just in terms of addressing today’s climate challenges, but it’s also increasingly important for investors, customers, and employees who recognise its impact [on the bottom line].

Computer vision will take a more prominent role as new technology…

Including low-latency 5G networks, edge-computing power, and AI tools, make AR and VR more accessible to frontline workers. This will lead to expanded use of AR and VR on the edge, including the expanded use of AR in field services.

Increased workload choices will enable more freedom and flexibility for IT Pros

With increased bandwidth, lower latency and mobility from 5G, there will no longer be any “obvious” decisions for where to process workloads. IT pros will have greater flexibility in designing networks that better suit their organisations’ changing needs. Bandwidth and physical constraints will no longer dictate business decisions as they have in previous years.

Deepak Gadkar – Head of AWS Business Unit at TCS ANZ

Here are the five essential trends that businesses must monitor for cloud success in 2023:

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CLOUD 2.0 – Cloud will enter a new phase becoming a core pillar of business strategy

Many initial cloud investments were made in a rush during the onset of the Covid pandemic to cater to remote working or a short-sighted goal of cost-savings. Now the global economy is forcing businesses to evaluate the true value of their cloud strategies by using metrics and businesses are starting to shift focus to fine-tuning their cloud-value evaluation models and asking how it can support customers or diversify revenue sources. This new perspective positions the cloud as a core pillar of modern business strategy which is crucial for driving growth, transformation, and continuous innovation.

Deepak Gadkar - Head of AWS Business Unit, TCS ANZ
Deepak Gadkar – provides his 2023 tech predictions.
Sovereign cloud – New data privacy regulations will push enterprises into sovereign cloud

Sovereign cloud is a security posture that any organisation can take to safeguard valuable data and systems from unauthorised foreign access on either a country or local level. The United National Conference on Trade and Development reports that have passed data and privacy laws which are prompting organisations to add sovereign cloud to their multi, hybrid, and poly-cloud strategies for regulatory compliance. This is set to make smart system integrations, interoperability and portability more complex but imperative in 2023 and beyond. Preventing privacy breaches will be front of mind for Australian businesses due to recent cyber-attacks which have prompted the government to increase the penalty for companies failing to take care of customer data adequately. Earlier this week, the Australian government announced Parliamentary approval on the Privacy Legislation Amendment (Enforcement and Other Measures) Bill 2022. Commonly known as the Privacy Penalty Bill, the new legislation substantially increases penalties for repeated or severe privacy breaches by companies not doing enough to secure customer data.

Cloud innovation – 5G and edge computing will significantly accelerate business operations

By bringing computation and storage closer to data sources, businesses can improve their response times and save bandwidth, while advances in the edge cloud are set to multiply applications on the frontlines of businesses, including in-store and on-site operations and sustainability solutions. Although still in the early stages of development, quantum computing is inching ever closer to reality with an increasing number of companies preparing to adopt quantum capabilities. Dramatic progress in artificial intelligence, machine learning, virtual reality and augmented reality for eventual immersion in the metaverse, is also expected to deepen cloud’s role in modern business and everyday life.

Industry cloud – Enterprises will begin reaping the rewards from their industry-specific cloud investments

Cloud computing can be uniquely tailored for specific sectors to deliver business value, not just more effective back-end IT operations. From fast-changing supply chains to energy efficient sustainability initiatives, smart businesses that are investing in industry cloud-native solutions to address common pain points can expect a significant boost in their KPIs. Consumer-facing sectors—like retail and hospitality—will also see growth in industry cloud activity, as they are best positioned to make immediate use of edge computing. We expect industry-specific cloud success stories to flourish from this year onwards.

Shifting talent – The talent gap will widen as cloud technologies evolve and demand new digital skillsets

The cloud is creating new opportunities for companies and employees, but the challenge is training staff to become multi-cloud architects. This will take a collective global effort across enterprise, government, academia and industry bodies to equip employees with the training and tools to thrive in the new era of cloud innovation. We expect a race for top talent contrasting against the broader pressures on workforces due to the economic downturn. Businesses must double-down on training, retraining, and retaining their staff if they are to turn their vision for a cloud-powered business into reality as quickly as possible. Australian organisations are making progress with cloud migration, but still lag global peers when it comes IT budgets and talent shortages.

Ultimately, Cloud spending will continue to face scrutiny given the global economic headwinds. But we believe it will endure and, in fact, increase, especially in the medium- to long-term. New technologies and collaborations are driving innovation and will continue to deliver precisely the types of cloud-powered services becoming vital to global business. Companies that proactively develop ‘cloud-first’ strategies to address and master these new trends will be dramatically better-positioned to realise healthy returns on their investments into 2023.

Dell recently held its own “2023 Resolutions” event. It featured several senior leaders. Here are their 2023 tech predictions:

John Roese – Global Chief Technology Officer at Dell Technologies

Managing the long-term costs of cloud and deciding nature of multicloud edge architecture amongst top CIO priorities for 2023

Customers can no longer afford to be over budget due to an inefficient distribution of their IT capabilities on the cloud and that there is a need to understand long-term costs.

John Roese - Global Chief Technology Officer at Dell Technologies
John Roese – Global Chief Technology Officer at Dell Technologies – makes his 2023 tech predictions.

It is crucial that modern companies adopt a multicloud approach that allows them to have ultimate control over their data and applications, residing wherever it makes the most sense for them. The approach should also be more cost-effective and reduce the overall complexity of the cloud.

In 2023, more of our data and processing will be needed in the real world. The edge is now everywhere and the opportunities for edge computing are endless. If organisations do not make a decision about which edge architecture they want in the long-term, they may end up with multiple edges.

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We need to have a strategic view as we take charge of our architecture. Evaluating current models and identifying the architecture that will best allow us to manage and orchestrate data and workloads across clouds without added complexity and hidden costs is critical.

Determine quantum safe cryptography risks for the organisation and establish early skill sets to take advantage of quantum computing

Quantum computing is getting real – in a few years, we will have access to large enough quantum systems that will pose significant risk to encrypted data across public networks. However, organisations now also have the tools to make their data quantum safe.

Organisations need to first catalogue their cryptographic assets across the entire enterprise and identify threats that they face. They then need to invest in quantum simulation and enable their data science and AI teams to learn the new languages and capability of quantum to be ready to take on associated challenges.

Amit Midha – President, Asia-Pacific & Japan and Global Digital Cities at Dell Technologies

Amit Midha - President, Asia-Pacific & Japan and Global Digital Cities at Dell Technologies
Dell’s Amit Midha makes his 2023 tech predictions.
Technology will continue to be pivotal to driving the future of society in APJ

Technology remains at the forefront of transformation, digital unity and driving human progress. APJ’s continued growth is expected despite the uncertain macroeconomic climate, and the region’s population will continue to increase. We need to expand how we think about technology to better harness it. This will help us navigate and shape the future of society.

Digital solutions are essential to driving human progress, including accelerating sustainable cities of the future. Through technology such as digital twins, cities can build towards their sustainability and climate goals by modelling and better understanding energy consumption patterns and emissions.

Fleming Shi – Chief Technology Officer at Barracuda Networks

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this year revealed the modern digital battlefield – wiperware
Fleming Shi - Chief Technology Officer at Barracuda Networks
Flaming Shi of Barracudda makes 2023 tech predictions.

Most notably, we have witnessed an increased use of wiperware, a form of destructive malware against Ukrainian organisations and critical infrastructure. The frequency has dramatically increased as we saw WhisperGate, Caddy Wiper, HermeticWiper, and others hitting the news since the war broke out. Unlike the financial motivations and decryption potential of ransomware, wiperware is typically deployed by nation-state actors with the sole intent to damage and destroy an adversary’s systems beyond recovery.

In addition, in 2023, wiperware emanating from Russia will likely spill over into other countries as geopolitical tensions continue; and hacktivism by non-state actors seeking additional measures to exploit victims. To ensure business continuity despite an attack, it’s imperative for organisations to focus on full-system recovery that provides operability of the entire system instead of just data. For example, a speedy restoration of the virtual version of a targeted physical system will dramatically improve the resiliency of your business against wiperware or other destructive malware attacks.

Ransomware-as-a-service

At the same time, throughout 2022, the major ransomware gangs — LockBit, Conti, and Lapus$ — were behind blockbuster attacks, keeping them in the headlines. But in 2023, with the ransomware-as-a-service business model taking off and the recent build leak of LockBit 3.0, a new generation of smaller and smarter gangs will steal their limelight. During the year, organisations will experience an increased frequency of ransomware attacks with new tactics, and those that aren’t prepared will make headlines that devastate their business and reputation.

Pieter Danhieux – CEO and Co-Founder at Secure Code Warrior

Attacks on healthcare set to increase

2022 saw significant threat activity against targets in the healthcare industry, resulting in that vertical experiencing the highest increase in volume of cyberattacks across all sectors, at 69 per cent year over year. Sadly, I think that will continue, largely due to the complex, legacy systems so often in place.

Pieter Danhieux - CEO and Co-Founder at Secure Code Warrior
CEO of Secure Code Warrior, Pieter Danhieux, makes his 2023 Tech Predictions.

With healthcare institutions requiring fast-paced digital transformation and maintenance like any other industry, it is all too easy for access control errors, misconfigurations, and other known exploits to go unpatched. A threat actor needs just one window of opportunity to inflict serious damage, and for organisations who are not putting their best defensive security strategy forward – which includes frequent and precision training of the development cohort – it’s hard to see this changing.

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More Nation-State attacks

In addition, we cannot ignore the fact that, globally, there is an ongoing conflict between several world superpowers, and modern warfare has an increasingly digital front. Nation-State attacks will become more prevalent to cause chaos and interference, and are likely to target enterprises in telco, health, finance, and utilities to disrupt key economic pillars and manipulate public opinion.

Markus Nispel, EMEA CTO at Extreme Networks

More automation and AI for IT operations (AIOps)

As automation and AI for IT operations (AIOps) are two advanced key areas of technology to invest in, this will also require some level of investment in basic programming and data engineering skills.

Markus Nispel, EMEA CTO at Extreme Networks
Markus Nispel, EMEA CTO at Extreme Networks, talks about his 2023 tech predictions.

Development of these skills is vital in order to better understand the concepts of machine learning and AI – not only for what it can do in terms of networking and security, but also how this technology can assist, enable and maximize the return of investment that organizations get from their digital transformation journeys. What’s more, employees that can act as the “interface” between business and IT are key assets in those digital transformation journeys.

More security talent needed

Additionally, given the increasing dependency on networking infrastructure, companies should also prioritise investing in security skills. In particular, security awareness for the entire employee base is very critical for companies today. As more businesses embrace and rely on digital technologies to keep their workforce and business operations connected, cyber threats will only grow in sophistication, requiring highly-skilled talent with the right knowledge to keep evolving technology secure.

Chris Thomas – Senior Security Advisor, Asia Pacific and Japan at ExtraHop

With the rise of supply chain attacks, organisations will need to be smarter about vetting third- party vendors.
Chris Thomas - Senior Security Advisor, Asia Pacific and Japan at ExtraHop
Chris Thomas 2023 tech predictions.

A potential contractor’s security posture and network security strategy will be a determining factor for doing business. Vetting will also need to extend to understanding third party dependencies in a developer’s code. For example, do you know where that countdown widget on your website really comes from? What code is in it and what it is accessing? Security teams will need to update their strategy to include vetting even the simplest integrations to secure their framework.

We will continue to see an increase in fake virus advertisements phishing emails or texts

Attackers have become so creative and they are now mimicking legitimate precautionary notices and capitalising on well publicised breaches – like Optus and Medibank in AU. These lures and tricks are so convincing that even some of the most tech savvy professionals are falling victim to these schemes. High profile breaches will continue to be the “gift that keeps on giving” for attackers

Dean Hager – CEO at Jamf

IT security policies that render technology unusable will ultimately make organisations less secure

The same leadership philosophy that leads to employee spy-like tools also leads information security teams to lock down technology — in the name of greater security — to the point that it no longer achieves the goal it was deployed to achieve in the first place: to simplify work. After all, employees simply will not tolerate delivering less than their best.

Dean Hager - CEO at Jamf
Dean Hager – CEO at Jamf, does his 2023 tech predictions.

As such, if IT and Info Sec teams do not provide a path to productivity, employees will find one — most often by using their unsecured personal computing devices. This reality will lead to security policies that preserve consumer-like user experiences, promote employee device choice programs, and embrace and rethink BYOD.

More BYOD programs

As money becomes tighter over the next year, BYOD programs that make sense will be pursued, because the alternatives: carrying two phones and work apps being accessed on unprotected personal phones are both problematic. Unless organisations present a compelling solution, such as partitioning a personal device to keep personal private and work protected, people will find a way to be productive with or without IT approval. IT and Security teams will need to work together on implementing new technology that empowers productivity, protects privacy and fades into the background.

Kevin Kirkwood – Deputy CISO at LogRhythm

Open-source software and software supply chain attacks

Asia-Pacific (APAC) organisations are at the forefront of open-source software adoption, having observed the highest growth amidst the pandemic. However, the imperative concern of open-source security ensues. With the region’s high reliance on open-source software, organisations are likely to be perceived as prime targets to cyberthreats from supply chains. In 2023, we will see bad actors attack APAC’s vulnerabilities in low-hanging open-source vendors with the intention of compromising the global supply chain that utilises third-party code.

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Kevin Kirkwood - Deputy CISO at LogRhythm
Kevin Kirkwood of LogRhythm’s 2023 tech predictions.

In recent years, hackers have become more strategic when it comes to exploiting open-source software and code so 2023 will be no different. Bad actors examine the code and its components to obtain a thorough understanding of its flaws and the most effective ways to exploit them.

Most folks think of ‘supply chain attacks’ as an attack on the physical pipeline that will prevent one from producing physical products. Software supply chain attacks are similar in nature to the physical world. Developers use libraries, executable code and code snippets to complete their software products. If those elements are compromised and malicious code is introduced to those elements, the end product produced becomes a vehicle for threat actors to compromise the product and potentially gain entry to the system that houses the software.

Blindspots to surprise businesses, as they cut corners to make ends meet in uncertain economic times

In tough economic times, an organisation’s c-suite will be focused on cutting what they perceive as non-essential costs and carefully analyse what they would choose to protect from a business perspective. However, as organisations balance between international turning points and scaling down operations, threats will inevitably continue to evolve as cybercriminals take this chance to up their attack game during the recession. Therefore, it is crucial that all organisations, regardless of sectors, take on proactive security strategies, adopt frontline prevention and detection technologies together with other security tools that provide pre-emptive capabilities.

Alteryx had plenty of 2023 tech predictions…

Libby Duane Adams – Co-Founder and Chief Advocacy Officer at Alteryx

Data-driven companies will modernize the re-skilling of employees

Data analytics are now a key investment for companies. It is imperative for every organization and every leader to match that investment by allocating resources into modernizing the reskilling of employees. Employees skilled in data literacy and analytics are the most important asset to every business looking to make strategic decisions with data. 

Libby Duane Adams - Co-Founder and Chief Advocacy Officer at Alteryx
Alteryx Co-Founder, Libby Duane Adams makes her 2023 tech predictions.

In 2023, we will see an acceleration of modern analytics learning opportunities, such as Datathons, internal data analytics user groups, extend to knowledge workers within lines of business. Leaders are also enabling employees with ‘time on the job’, such as 10 percent of their work week, to invest in the development of new skills or something they are passionate about.

By infusing fun, hands-on experiences, and encouraging collaboration between technical data experts and knowledge workers, organizations and leaders will start to see their workforce investments pay in dividends. 

The talent gap will drive organizations to invest in the future workforce

The skills needed to succeed in business today are outpacing the speed of learners graduating from Higher Education programs. This has resulted in talent shortages in areas like analytics and data science, with employees entering the workforce unprepared to meet the expectations of their role. Amid the talent gap, more organizations are investing now in their future workforce – from technical training to cross collaborations with education institutions to provide learning paths in areas where they experience shortage.

At Alteryx, we offer Alteryx SparkED – a no-cost data analytics education program for learners in any field of study, because every knowledge worker needs the skills to question, understand, and solve with data. With the development and implementation of modern learning skills, every new employee now has the benefit of bringing on the right skillset to hit the ground running on Day 1 of employment.

Steve Brodrick – Chief Transformation Officer at Alteryx

Blurring the lines of business
Steve Brodrick - Chief Transformation Officer at Alteryx
Steve Brodrick, Chief Transformation Officer at Alteryx, makes his 2023 tech predictions.

In three to five years, we will see more transferable skill sets that drive solutions across traditional business functional roles. Instead of working in distinct lines of business such as finance or human resources, they will use their process automation and data analytics skillsets to find solutions for business problems across the organization.

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Creating new revenue streams with analytics

The uncertain economic climate is going to drive companies to dig deeper and create new sources of revenue. Successful companies will use analytics to get closer to consumers and identify the right selling opportunities to meet ever-changing customer demands.

Alan Jacobson – Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Alteryx

More knowledge workers in non-data science roles will turn to advanced analytic techniques
Alan Jacobson - Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Alteryx
Alan Jacobson – Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Alteryx’s 2023 tech predictions.

Thirty years ago, a marketing professional didn’t need to know about the internet. Fast forward to today and it’s an integral part of just about any job, including marketing.

Analytics is on a similar trajectory, and that will become even clearer in the coming year. We’ll see more companies enable knowledge workers throughout their business to garner impactful insights from their data. The combination of no-code/code-friendly cloud analytics solutions and increased investments in data literacy and upskilling will take data analytics out of the realm of specialty roles and into the entire organization. 

In 2023, companies will look beyond the, “single version of the truth”

For some time now, companies have focused on a goal of delivering a data strategy to ascertain a single, absolute truth. While that sounds good in theory, it isn’t so simple in practice. Often, there can be multiple right answers to a question depending on how one defines the parameters around that question.

What’s often more important than a single version of truth, or one right answer, is the ability to communicate the context of the question – the “why.” Based on that, companies can pull data in ways to understand and drive business results. We’ll see more companies become more analytically mature by asking better questions, recognizing the nuances in finding answers, and discovering their own insights instead of relying on the single version of truth.  In the end, they will drive a culture of analytics.

Dr. Richard George – VP, Workforce Skills at Pearson

Pearson’s Tech Predictions stretch out to 2026

Pearson used Faethm’s workforce A.I. and predictive analytics tool to look at census, workforce and recruitment data in four major economies, including Australia. It did this by analysing half-a-million, recent, Australian job ads to identify today’s new ‘power skills’ – those capabilities now powering the world’s economy and individual careers.

Dr Richard George VP Workforce Skills at Pearson 2023 Tech Predictions
Dr Richard George.

The analysis shows that while technical capabilities remain vitally important for many roles, employers highly prize human skills such as collaboration, communication and leadership. It also found that, despite new technologies transforming the world of work, the top five most in-demand skills in Australia today are human skills and that this trend is set to continue through to at least 2026. More results and methodology can be accessed in Pearson’s Skills Outlook report.

Job ads in 2022 were dominated by five human skills:

  1. Communication
  2. Attention to detail
  3. Customer service
  4. Leadership
  5. Teamwork

Looking ahead to 2026, Pearson’s AI-based modelling suggests that the top five power skills that will be most in-demand to meet economic need are also human skills:

  1. Collaboration
  2. Customer Focus
  3. Personal Learning & Mastery
  4. Achievement Focus
  5. Cultural and Social Intelligence

In Australia we’re seeing businesses and governments alike scramble to fill the 1.2 million tech jobs that will be needed by 2030. It is alarming to see that the most pressing skills needed in the Australian workforce today and in the future are in fact human skills.

Businesses need to act now to address this silent skills gap. Swift investment is urgently needed as a strong foundation of human skills is essential to success for employers and employees. As the adoption of new technologies continues, the importance of non-technical skills such as the ability to learn and cultural and social intelligence, are only becoming more important. Organisations that recognise this gap and invest in helping employees build capabilities that are transferable and flexible are the ones that will thrive in our changing world.

Although demand for technical skills is increasing, technology evolves so quickly that these capabilities often have a short shelf-life and can be unique to specific industries or jobs. People in tech roles need human skills to be agile and adaptable in their learning. The research findings provide guidance to employers on where they should focus their training and education programs.

Aaron Cockerill – Chief Strategy Officer at Lookout

Data breaches will only prove more complicated

If there could be a headline for 2022 it would be “The Year of Ransomware.” If you look at the successful ransomware attacks in recent years, almost every single one was oriented around data theft and double extortion. At this point, attackers don’t need to go through the trouble of encrypting data. It’s more effective for them to be able to demonstrate that they’ve stolen data and receive their payout.

Aaron Cockerill - Chief Strategy Officer at Lookout
Lookout’s Aaron Cockerill makes his 2023 Tech Predictions.

On the whole, we expect 2023 to be similar in terms of the volume and severity of data breaches. What will be different is how attackers will execute the attacks that lead to these breaches. Because of the widespread adoption of cloud services – which is, no doubt, a good thing – bad actors have shifted gears from attacking unpatched systems and have opted instead to attack cloud services by executing account takeovers and exploiting cloud misconfigurations.

We’ve observed that the majority of bad actors are either purchasing credentials on the dark web or mounting social engineering campaigns to gain access to these cloud systems. This means that tools that rely on breach detection through the presence of malicious code are going to be less effective. Breach detection that relies on user and entity behaviour analytics will be more effective.

While two-factor authentication is critical in the fight against data breaches, it alone is not enough at preventing them. In the future, the best of both worlds will be to move Fast ID Online (FIDO) tokens to mobile devices. This technology would allow for the use of biometric sensors and many other contexts that would help to establish whether the authentication is legitimate or not.

The burning issue now is data protection. In the next year, CISOs and CIOs alike will need to worry less about malicious code installed on systems and worry more about the potential theft of data. The two areas of focus should be better continuous user authentication and data protection.

Since attackers are primarily focused on data, CISOs and CIOs need to be able to understand when data is being attacked, stolen, or misused. Additionally, because malicious code has been used less by attackers, we need to be able to identify data breaches through things like anomalous data use. This is how we turn the tide against data breaches.

Senior leaders from Lookout have provided a bunch of 2023 Tech Predictions…

Sundaram Lakshmanan – CTO at Lookout

Specialised point products will become the Achilles’ heel of enterprise security. Put aside the problems or the breaches of the future for a moment. Even the current breaches we are seeing now cannot be prevented or responded to or remediated unless organizations start thinking about cloud-delivered, integrated security platforms. Without this, the problem will be harder and harder for companies using siloed point products – regardless of whether they’re hosted on-premises or in the cloud.

The warning signs are everywhere: data security best practices sometimes fall through the cracks and breaches are becoming incredibly complex. As data, devices, and users continue to become more interconnected, IT and security teams need to consolidate their security solutions to avoid the complexities of trying to secure data with multiple tools. The platform approach will help ensure that all data– regardless of whether it lives in the cloud, on-prem, or in a private app – is being protected under uniform data security policies.

For the next few years, this issue should be top-of-mind: there is simply no other way for enterprises to easily stop breaches or troubleshoot a breach or respond to a breach or understand the breach without the visibility and control that a platform approach can provide.

The secure services edge (SSE) market is proving that a combination of cloud access security broker (CASB), zero-trust network access (ZTNA), and secure web gateway (SWG) in a single platform is the most forward-looking approach to securing remote workers and protecting data across the modern enterprise infrastructure. A recent survey by Gartner, Inc. found that 75 per cent of organizations are pursuing security vendor consolidation in 2022, up from 29 per cent in 2020.

Attacks are getting more personal

Another thing we can expect in the coming year will be that targeted attacks will be much more personal in nature. Already, we see attackers steering away from targeting official work emails to ensnare their victims. Instead, they’re finding more success by sending targeted social engineering campaigns to personal accounts of employees through SMS messages and third-party messaging apps such as Whatsapp.

This stems from a larger trend we’ve seen taking place. Our personal and work lives are blurring more and more together with every new technological advancement. Even before the pandemic, 80 per cent of senior IT and business leaders surveyed by Oxford Economics believed their employees could not do their jobs effectively without a smartphone.

This is something we can learn from the recent Uber breach. There is currently very little tech coverage to give visibility into what’s happening to enterprise data and little control over this surface (which is easiest to exploit). As a result, user error and account compromises will become more pronounced.

Contextual DLP will be the number one technology to thwart data breaches

DLP isn’t new technology, in fact, it’s been around for decades. DLP puts lofty ideas like “zero trust” into practice. It’s one thing to say “secure all the data,” but an entirely different thing to implement it. With its powerful applications and strong features, there’s no doubt that DLP will remain the best solution for preventing data loss for the next five to 10 years.

There are a couple of main areas where I see DLP evolving in the next five to ten years. One area is how technology understands data content. It’s one thing to identify sensitive data or personal identifying information (PII). However, it’s a completely different thing to identify whether a document, file, or object has sensitive information. Modern DLP solutions are giving organisations the tools to understand the contents of a file without the manual need to read a 100-megabyte document. Within moments, a DLP can tell you whether a document should be classified for HIPAA or PCI.

Once you understand the data, you can then put in controls for protecting that data. DLP provides a single coverage for every lane of traffic your data travels, including email, internet, and sharing traffic. User and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) integrated with DLP can provide context which enables you to predict and detect data infiltration and data exfiltration.

With ransomware attacks especially, attackers may live undetected in your network for up to six months before they start moving data to another site. With DLP in place, as soon as data starts to move to another web server or site, the traffic is inspected by DLP. In the same way, DLP can catch when important files are exposed on an Amazon s3 bucket or GDrive. In these ways, DLP can change the tide against data breaches by aiding breach detection and prevention.

Security automation will be a massive differentiator (You need SASE for a real XDR)

DLP is one critical piece to the puzzle that lies before us, but the visibility and controls it provides are useless without security automation in place. To do a better job of protection, you need to have better network visibility (CASB, Endpoints, SWG, Internal Apps with ZTNA). One thing that we see that is currently missing is the SSE telemetry being an integral part of a real XDR.

Just about everyone has slapped the label of Extended Detection and Response (XDR) onto their Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solution, including SIEM vendors. This trend will no doubt continue. Nonetheless, XDR is still a valuable tool to have in place to address the security challenges of the future. After all, if you look at the kill chain of a ransomware attack, the organization’s EDR region is one of the first things bad actors will attempt to turn off.

XDR is more than endpoints and more than understanding your logs/visibility. Of course you need both of the above, but more importantly, you need to put a “brain” behind it to predict breaches in real-time.

2023 Will be the year we put identity and data into focus

Organisations are quickly realizing how daunting it is to apply the theory of zero trust to every aspect in their organisation. For large organisations especially, this gargantuan task would take hundreds of years to accomplish, and in the end, would not prove to be the best use of time or resources. This leaves the question of what is vital to secure if the task of securing everything is impossible.

Digital Transformation started decades ago with organisations moving applications outside of data centers. They moved data to SaaS applications like Salesforce and Office 365, and they also moved data to private cloud applications like AWS and GCP. This trend showed that businesses can run without hardware or servers.

In the last few years, the hybrid and remote working environment proved that you cannot trust the network, as employees were able to access it outside of the control of traditional security perimeter tools such as VPNs and firewalls. Remote work also proved another point: anyone can do any job from anywhere on any device.

So, what remains important to run the business? From the outset, digital transformation, remote working, and BYOD clearly show that enterprises will be more and more interested in securing identity and data, rather than hardware, physical devices, software, or networks.

This makes a lot of sense if you think about a business broadly: every employee, customer, or user that joins a company has a digital identity, and these entities consume data, produce data, transfer data, and transport data. In the future, enterprises will be more and more interested in securing their people, identity, and data. Technologies that secure these elements will have to evolve and the silos these solutions reside in will need to dissolve.

What organisations need to do now is narrow their focus and apply zero trust toward protecting identity and data. This narrower focus will give you a more actionable set of things to work on.

Aiven’s Troy Sellers has also produced many 2023 Tech Predictions.

Troy Sellers – Solutions Architect Lead, APAC at Aiven

Managing IT digitisation will experience increased friction as economic uncertainty continues

The accelerated digitalisation seen across Australia and New Zealand during COVID-19 will continue at pace. However, expect increased friction as businesses balance the need to push forward with digitalisation efforts while managing talent shortages and the anticipated economic downturn. Businesses will need to stretch IT dollars further, balancing ongoing digital growth while also reducing spend.

This increased cost pressure, combined with the ongoing talent shortage, will see outsourcing IT services becoming ‘the norm’. Companies opting for managed services can tighten spending on resources and focus on the things that will deliver value for their businesses, without sacrificing on performance, security, and the stability of the data that they’re trying to collect.

Tapping into data-focused managed services will enable businesses to generate more value from data
Troy Sellers - Solutions Architect Lead, APAC at Aiven
2023 Tech Predictions from Aiven’s Troy Sellers.

Most companies now understand the concept of data as an asset, but many are still struggling to unlock its true potential to create new products and revenue streams. This is where outsourcing the management of big data gets interesting. Companies that capture all their data and put this into a managed service will effectively free up valuable time, allowing them to focus their efforts on innovation rather than keeping their databases running.

Once businesses better understand their data, they can make more informed decisions and build a virtuous cycle of new revenue streams that are generating new data and driving more customer value. In addition, tapping into established managed services enables businesses to shift focus to new products they can build with their datasets, including extracting additional value from the different ways that their data is connected.

Specialist industry cloud platforms will drive more open source adoption

Cloud has changed the world and continues to do so. At present, separate specialists are available to build out data infrastructure, and then help businesses to manage and run data infrastructure securely and effectively. However, in 2023, we expect to see a continued shift towards deeper specialisation. Essentially, the building of specialist industry cloud platforms on top of existing managed cloud services, to help accelerate problem solving and bring everything closer together.

We expect that the growth in industry cloud platforms will drive more open source adoption, especially in relation to managed services – after all, it doesn’t make much sense for specialist cloud businesses to run on proprietary software. The true value of these industry cloud platforms will be delivering deeper industry expertise – the next layer of fabric when it comes to delivering hyper specialisation technology. 

Within Australia and New Zealand, the healthcare sector is one industry where we are seeing this specialisation emerging, with the digital health record a great example of this trend in action. New tools being built on top of existing technology to provide industry-specific cloud solutions. This is another building block that will enable businesses to build high value services for health professionals and, ultimately, patients.

Platform engineering will be outsourced to maximise resources and spend

A key aspect of outsourcing industry cloud platforms is platform engineering. According to the Equinix 2022 Global Tech Trends Survey, 65 per cent of Australian IT decision-makers view the current IT talent drought as one of the main threats to their business. During a time when resources are tight and businesses are looking for ways to reduce costs and boost revenue, outsourcing platform engineering is becoming much more commonplace.

While this trend is relevant to everyone, small to medium businesses can greatly benefit from a managed services partner that brings specialist platform engineering capability into the business.

Namely, it can build capacity for open source data products, increase optionality around cloud providers and enable development to move faster. It can result in reduced costs – especially when compared to other options and can help boost revenue streams while remaining secure and compliant, with less risk and downtime.

Hyperscaling will grow in popularity as businesses look for solutions that will scale up and down at will

While Software as a Service (SaaS) accounts for almost half of the entire cloud market in Australia, the fastest growing segments are Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Gartner analysts have stated that the acceleration in cloud spending seen during the pandemic is expected to continue as organisations respond to a new business dynamic. Already, hyperscale service providers increased their presence in the ANZ region last year, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) establishing new on-premises zones in Perth and Brisbane with Auckland in the works, and the Microsoft Azure data centre in New Zealand adding to the three currently operating in Australia.

Within the hyperscale boom, businesses are seeking IaaS capabilities and open source solutions that will help to prevent vendor lock-in. Overall, with more complex and modern cloud infrastructure, businesses are requiring the best-of-breed solutions to cater to their developmental needs, including the ability to remain flexible and agile, while managing workloads and accelerating innovation in a disruptive industry, by combining software, platform, and infrastructure.

Wendy Pfeiffer – CIO at Nutanix

The global pinch on energy supply will cause organisations to rethink their IT infrastructure models with more consideration given to power consumption and carbon footprint.
Wendy Pfeiffer Nutanix 2023 Tech Predictions
Wendy Pfeiffer, Nutanix CIO, Makes her 2023 Tech Predictions.

Organisations are being told to be more efficient with power consumption and it’s not just a sustainability issue. While reducing carbon footprint and going green is commendable and an increased point of consideration for potential customers, companies are feeling the impact of oversized power consumption against their bottom line when it comes to cloud usage.

The cloud is built for speed and performance, not for economy when it comes to cost and power, leaving companies to consider how tasks they’re currently pushing to cloud might be handled elsewhere more efficiently and economically.

Adoption of asynchronous work processes supporting contributions from workforces across the globe will be necessary in order to increase productivity

New, more-effective ways to collaborate, especially across multiple time zones, will drive innovation in 2023. This will mean rethinking companies’ approach to asynchronous collaboration including tooling and policies to better support it. In order to succeed, complexity must be supplanted by simplicity and automation will become even more necessary.

Seismic shifts to social media as we know it will have a significant impact well beyond those platforms

2022 has been a rollercoaster of a year for social media platforms, and some of the trends we’re seeing are not likely to reverse direction. This will have a trickle-down effect on multiple organisations. First, many organisations rely on data purchased from social media companies to tune their own targeting algorithms; targeting that will become less refined as social media data sets become outdated and less curated. Second, the data sets are often the basis to train AI and ML tools; as data sets become outdated, I expect AI and ML that rely on it to become much less effective.

Get in touch if you’d like to add your 2023 tech predictions.

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About The Author

Nick Ross

Nick Ross is a veteran tech journalist. He is Editor of SMBtech, an Australian-focused website for technology and business.

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