Security, scrutiny and supply chain: tech in 2023

Australia’s technology landscape is feeling the aftershock of many disruptive moments from the year just gone. High-profile data breaches, increased push for climate change action, developments in artificial intelligence and a crippling cost of living crisis are just a few on the list.

2023 promises to be no different, providing new challenges and opportunities that Australian IT leaders will need to navigate — to grow and succeed in an ever-changing tech ecosystem.

Recent months have found Australia caught in the midst of cyber warfare, with prominence of cyber attacks re-sparking the conversation on data security and rewriting the narrative on just how vital effective data protection is. Citizens are now demanding answers to critical questions: who has access to my personal data? What sensitive documents are exposed? What are public and private organisations doing to protect this data?

With security being an all-encompassing point of priority in the new year, it is important for IT leaders to be aware of and prepare for other challenges likely to fall at their feet. We’ve unpacked the top six trends and changes we see taking the lead in the year ahead.

1. There will be more scrutiny on cloud budgets

According to Veritas research, 99% of Australian organisations are overspending on cloud, going over their allocated cloud budgets by an average of 50%. As the amount of data continues to grow year over year, so does the cost of storing it in the cloud. While the widespread cloud adoption has helped businesses to weather the COVID storm and realise advanced business strategies, the ballooning storage cost is becoming harder to justify. To regain control of their budgets, CEOs and boards will increasingly demand transparency surrounding the ROI on their cloud spend.

With many Australian economists predicting a continued economic slowdown next year, we expect scrutiny on IT spending to intensify further in 2023, putting pressure on IT leaders to justify their cloud budgets while identifying new ways to reduce data volumes. This could lead to more effective data storage and management strategies, such as deduplication (a process that eliminates excessive copies of data and decreases storage capacity requirements) techniques to ensure reduced storage consumption.

2. Supply chain shortages to put pressure on software vendors

Software has been at the forefront of innovation, with software-only vendors delivering new solutions quickly to the market. However, geopolitical restrictions and chip shortages have impacted the supply chain, with a lack of hardware availability set to be a major challenge in 2023.

To counteract these supply chain woes in 2023, vendors must urge customers to embrace cloud-based solutions and appliances — with hardware and software already bundled together — rather than having to manage multiple relationships and endure lengthy waits for hardware to arrive. By leveraging cloud-based solutions, companies will be better able to ensure business continuity by responding more quickly and accurately to the needs of their customers with greater agility and flexibility.

3. Cross-cloud data mobility will become mainstream

Veritas research found that 70% of Australian enterprises added five or more cloud services to their IT infrastructure in 2021, compared to 54% worldwide. While there are countless benefits to a multi-cloud strategy, such as flexibility and agility, interoperability continues to be a challenge for data managers. Not only is it expensive to move data from cloud to cloud, but when clouds don’t work together seamlessly, this creates silos within an organisation and can introduce major security vulnerabilities.

As organisations work to address interoperability challenges and gain more control in the cloud, cross-cloud data mobility will become more mainstream in 2023. By leveraging AI/ML and autonomous solutions, enterprises will be better able to keep up with the pace of cloud offerings, achieve business-driven cloud goals, mitigate the challenges of siloed workloads and enhance cloud interoperability.

4. Low code/no code applications will create compliance issues

Low code/no code applications, which are visual software development environments that allow enterprise and citizen developers to easily create mobile or web apps, have been instrumental in democratising app development across companies, as they provide software environments and tools for people who either don’t know how or have no time to code.

In 2023, low code/no code adoption will become mainstream, and non-technical employees (citizen developers) across any organisation will have the power to create their own apps.

While this will significantly alleviate the burden on IT teams, it will also create a big compliance risk for organisations. As citizen developers don’t have the same experience in implementing security and privacy, most of the applications they develop won’t be adequately protected and protection policies may be inaccurately applied. As a result, not only will organisations face compliance issues, but their applications may also create new vulnerabilities for malicious actors to exploit.

5. More edge devices mean more vulnerabilities

Globally, Gartner predicts that by 2025, more than 50% of enterprise-managed data will be created and processed outside the data centre or cloud. As more data processing moves to the edge, it complicates IT architecture and increases the attack surface. What’s more, enterprises often don’t apply the same level of protection to the edge as they do in the data centre or the cloud, usually due to skills and staffing shortages.

To fully protect the enterprise, each of these edge devices needs to be protected and backed up. On top of that, organisations need to determine what data coming from edge devices is critical versus non-critical to maintain storage and protection costs, considering the added scrutiny on IT budgets.

6. Kubernetes goes mission-critical

Over the last 24 months, Kubernetes has become mainstream. The rise of hybrid working world has created the demand for multi-cloud flexibility, with an increased deployment of Kubernetes. Containers are now being adopted in mission-critical environments, meaning that the application environment and the underlying data in these environments now require protection. However, the data protection strategies in Kubernetes environments have not evolved in parallel with deployment.

Now, ownership of these containers and their protection has become more complex, creating silos and confusion over who’s responsible: is it the backup admin or the DevOps admin who should maintain control? At the same time, organisations are struggling to identify which containers to back up and how to do so, which will likely lead to more investment in training to help close the Kubernetes skills gap. In 2023, IT departments will continue to navigate how to adequately protect and back up their Kubernetes environments.

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