
Strategies for managing digital and cyber trends in 2023

The new year is launched and launched, destined to bring solutions and challenges that will impact all industries. As the faltering economy continues to crumble around broken supply chains and worsening cybersecurity outages, companies and analysts are more focused on what lies ahead.
TechNewsWorld sat down with IT executives to gather predictions for what 2023 holds. They offered insightful writings on the wall of what to expect moving forward.
One of the most critical areas is the need for more effective defenses to protect cyberinfrastructure. Politics aside, Executive Order 14028, issued in May 2021, clarified the priorities. President Biden’s order requires agencies to improve their security to ensure the integrity of the software supply chain.
“Software vendors can no longer hide their shortcomings, and software users can no longer hide from their responsibilities if they choose to deploy something inappropriate,” said Jon Geater, chief product and technology officer. at Rkvst, a SaaS platform for tracking supply chain issues. TechNewsWorld.
With still some way to go, he sees the digital supply chain finally being recognized as critical as the physical supply chain. Geater also sees a vital need for suppliers to deliver quality and for consumers to take control of their own risk.
“Companies and governments around the world are realizing that the software they use to run their business operations and power the hardware and software solutions they use and provide to customers poses a significant risk,” a- he declared.
Absolute priority to basic technologies
The current political and macroeconomic situation is even worse than most people expected, which has a chilling effect on innovation, Geater noted.
People will focus more on cost reduction and efficiency. However, this will not diminish the importance of the core technologies being developed.
“But it shifts the focus from new use cases, such as active cyber defense, to improving existing use cases, like more effective audits,” he said.
Geater suggested that most supply chain problems stem from errors or oversights that originate in the supply chain itself, and which open the target to traditional cyberattacks.
“It’s a subtle but important difference. I believe most of the insights from improving supply chain visibility [in 2023] will emphasize that most threats come from mistakes, not malice,” Geater said.
Year of AI and ML
The new year will bring a new focus on machine learning operations (MLOps), predicted Moses Guttmann, CEO and co-founder of ClearML, an MLOps platform. It is essential to take stock of the evolution of machine learning as a discipline, technology and industry.
He expects spending on artificial intelligence and machine learning to continue to grow as companies look for ways to optimize rising investment and secure value, especially in a challenging macroeconomic environment.
“We’ve seen many leading tech companies announce layoffs in the latter part of 2022. It’s likely that none of these companies will lay off their most talented machine learning staff,” Guttmann suggested to TechNewsWorld.
However, to fill the void of fewer people in deeply technical teams, companies will need to lean even more into automation to maintain productivity and ensure project completion. He also expects to see companies that use ML technology put more systems in place to monitor and govern performance and make more data-driven decisions about how to manage ML or data science teams.
“With clearly defined goals, these technical teams will need to be more focused on KPIs, so that management can have a deeper understanding of machine learning ROI. The era of ambiguous benchmarks for ML is over,” Guttmann said.
End of talent hoarding
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become more mainstream over the past decade. Those working with ML are likely newer hires, as opposed to longer-term staff who have been working with AI for years.
Many big tech companies started hiring these types of workers because they could manage the financial cost and keep them away from competitors — not necessarily because they were needed, Guttmann noted.
“From this perspective, it is not surprising to see so many ML workers laid off, given the surplus within large companies. However, as the era of ML talent hoarding comes to an end, this could usher in a new wave of innovation and opportunity for startups,” he observed.
With so much talent looking for jobs, he expects to see many displaced workers leaving big tech to head into small and medium-sized businesses or startups.
Cloudy Predictions
Drew Firment, vice president of business strategies at Pluralsight, believes that foundational cloud computing skills will remain the most relevant and in-demand needs of workers for 2023. And this despite the fact that ML and IT IAs receive the most attention.
According to Pluralsight’s State of the Cloud report, 75% of technology leaders are building all new products and features in the cloud in the future. Yet he noted that only 8% of technologists have meaningful cloud-related skills and experience.
Ironically, there will always be a high demand for lower-level cloud infrastructure skills, as successful use of these technologies requires more people than higher-level services, added Mattias Andersson, principal developer advocate at Pluralsight.
“For example, many organizations now want to own and manage their own Kubernetes clusters, leading them to hire Kubernetes administration skills when they could instead outsource them to the cloud provider,” Andersson told TechNewsWorld.
Technology Talent Transfer
An expected shift from talent consumers to talent creators will be the key differentiator for cloud leaders in 2023, Firment added. Gartner reported that 50% of enterprise cloud migration would be delayed two years or more due to lack of cloud skills, which would directly impact enterprises’ ability to achieve cloud maturity and a return on their technology investments.
“To overcome the challenges of cloud adoption, companies need to invest as much effort in migrating their talent to the cloud as they do in migrating their applications,” Firment told TechNewsWorld. “Lift-and-shift migration strategies limit the benefits of cloud platforms, and the approach also doesn’t work well for workforce transformation.”
To achieve a sustainable transition to cloud adoption and maturity, companies must invest strategically in skills development programs designed to achieve critical mass cloud proficiency, he urged.
Multi-cloud adoption
Avoiding vendor lock-in is an important goal for 2023. According to Andersson, this is the strategy now prevalent in the industry landscape. More and more companies are adopting multi-cloud by design or by chance.
“Increased multi-cloud adoption will accelerate demand for the tools needed to manage increased complexity as enterprises struggle to manage the duration of their implementations. The trifecta of multi-cloud challenges and solutions that will be all the rage in 2023 include security, cost, and operations,” Andersson said.
This will place another demand on multi-cloud strategies, he added. Technologists must become multilingual across two or more cloud providers.
“With the current cloud talent shortage, expect the multi-cloud strategy trend to add further pressure to the existing skills gap,” he predicted.
Open-source role
Focusing on ML operations, management, and governance will force MLOps teams to do more with less. According to Guttmann, companies will adopt more off-the-shelf solutions because they are less expensive to produce, require less research time and can be customized to meet most needs.
“MLOps teams will also need to consider open-source infrastructure instead of locking themselves into long-term contracts with cloud providers. While organizations doing ML at scale can certainly benefit from integrating with their cloud providers, it forces those companies to work the way the provider wants,” he explained.
That means users might not be able to do what they want, the way you want, he warned. It also puts users at the mercy of the cloud provider for cost increases and upgrades.
On the other hand, open source offers flexible customization, cost savings, and efficiency. Users can even modify the open source code to make sure it works exactly the way they want.
“Especially with the reduction in technology teams, it becomes a much more viable option,” Guttmann concluded.
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