How the cloud can help manage uncertainty in 2023

Multicloud will become increasingly important as more and more services move from the local data center to the cloud.

Advanced Cloud and Multicloud

According to research firm Gartner, on-premises spending is expected to shift to the cloud by 2025. While this continued shift to the cloud is not surprising, I expect cloud adoption to continue to grow. Accelerating to 2023 due to supply chain issues forcing buyers to look beyond onsite hardware to mitigate supply challenges and the need to pursue ambitious sustainability goals.

Even more interesting is the rapid adoption of many clouds. In fact, 89% of businesses use multiple clouds* to manage their IT services, operations, and infrastructure. This seems to be an area that some companies have “landed” out of necessity, or even accident, as they struggle to mitigate supply chain issues by connecting to multiple cloud providers that can each help them. . drive innovation and provide security, scalability and flexibility outside of their data center. This has resulted in unnecessary complexity that businesses will seek to address by using standard cloud services.

Skills gap

The adoption of multi-cloud businesses will lead to the skills gap shifting from intense competition among employers to retain top talent, which I believe has been a problem in 2022, to a problem where appropriate skills will be needed to succeed. It’s hard enough to find talent that can work well in a cloud. Building teams skilled in managing multiple clouds therefore becomes a huge challenge and can take a long time to build. Companies need teams that have the ability to innovate and develop themselves. If employees only spend time in operations, they cannot change.

This need will only intensify, and companies need to become more comfortable hiring potential talent rather than talent, and be willing to provide team members with the training they need to succeed. .

Maintenance

Maintenance will only become more important to IT buyers, and they will need more data to support their vendor claims. Suppliers will need to demonstrate that they are working (and achieving) more sustainability in their value chains and provide product features that enable their sustainability. They will need to redouble their efforts to increase the energy efficiency of their facilities and equipment on site, and provide improved data categorization methods that allow users to analyze all their data, which is particularly effective in the cloud.

When we consider that 68% of data is used only once, we can see how moving this unused data to the cloud, where it can be tiered and transferred to less power-intensive, so-called “cold” storage, is good for the planet.

Last year, I noticed that sustainability was becoming increasingly important, but it was interesting to see a big change in the level of environmental stringency and the granularity of the attributes that consumers are now looking for when they make purchasing decisions.

Cyber-resilience and data protection

Current challenges in terms of health, economy and wars mean that cyber resilience is more important than ever. Businesses and organizations will increasingly rely on IT resources to ensure ongoing protection and rapid recovery of their data. In fact, the question is no longer if they will attack, but rather when and how often. So we have to face the problem, and a small number of small and medium-sized enterprises are still not ready.

Previously, the company’s cyber defense strategy focused on anticipating an attack, but now it’s more about responding during an attack and quickly recovering afterward. Detection, protection and remediation will be the watchwords of cybersecurity in 2023.

Hybrid quantum computing

Hybrid quantum computing will begin to move from concept to practical application; problems such as AI elements will be crunched and passed to quantum systems for processing; we will start to see a mixture of traditional HPC and quantum computing to solve some of these more complex problems. It will also force us to better address cybersecurity. Businesses need to think about data encryption more than ever.

Criminals are becoming more sophisticated and businesses need to be equally sophisticated in their security measures. While it won’t happen overnight, the engine is set in motion for quantum to pose a threat to the encryption of sensitive data. Example: Imagine designing and building a military fighter jet, which can take more than a decade. It will then be in service for 20 years and all data related to the aircraft and its missions will remain classified for another 20 years. This data must be protected for more than 50 years. And a criminal only needs to steal this data once this long and wait for the quantum power needed to decrypt it to finish the job.

We need to think more, more carefully about how we protect data today, from simple data theft to more advanced encryption and decryption techniques. Normal computers, even powerful computers, would take decades to “crack” these encryption algorithms. Hybrid quantum computing could break existing encryption protocols in less than a decade so that new encryption protocols and algorithms can be developed sooner.

Although I imagine in 2022 that enterprises will turn to quantum to address more complex computing challenges, I am glad that there has been so much progress and forward thinking in cybersecurity and a quantum-based strategy. cloud to solve security problems that sometimes seem intractable.