The new year is up and running, set to bring solutions and challenges affecting all industries. As the faltering economy continues to revolve around the ravages of broken supply chains and deteriorating cyber security, businesses and analysts alike are turning their attention to what’s next.

TechNewsWorld spoke with IT executives to gather predictions for what will happen in 2023. He offered insightful writing on the wall about what to expect going forward.

One of the most important areas is the need for more effective security to protect cyber infrastructure. Politics aside, Executive Order 14028 issued in May 2021 clarified the priorities. President Biden’s order requires agencies to improve their security to secure the integrity of the software supply chain.

“Software vendors can no longer hide from their shortcomings, and software users can no longer hide from their responsibilities,” said John Geter, chief product and technology officer at RKVST, a SaaS platform for tracking supply chain issues. Technewsworld.

With still a way to go, he sees the digital supply chain finally being recognized as just as important as the physical one. Gator also sees a critical need for suppliers to provide quality and for consumers to control their own risk.

He offered, “Companies and governments around the world are waking up to the fact that the software they use to run their enterprise operations and the hardware and software solutions they use and deliver to customers are represent a significant risk.”

Core Technologies Top Priority

Geter said the current political and macroeconomic conditions are worse than most people predicted, and this is having a chilling effect on innovation.

People will focus more on cost cutting and efficiency. However, this should not diminish the importance of the key technologies being developed.

“But it changes the emphasis from new use cases like proactive cyber defense to improvements in existing use cases like more efficient audits,” he said.

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Geter suggested that most supply chain problems come from mistakes or oversights that originate in the supply chain itself, and that leave targets open to traditional cyber attacks.

“It is a subtle distinction but an important one. I believe the bulk of the discoveries arising from improvements in supply chain visibility [in 2023] Will highlight that most threats arise from mistake, not malice,” said Geter.

Year of AI and ML

The new year will bring a renewed focus on machine learning operations (MLOps), predicted Moses Gutman, CEO and co-founder of ClearML, an MLOps platform. It is important to take stock of how machine learning has evolved as a discipline, technology and industry.

He expects artificial intelligence and machine learning spending to continue to grow as companies look for ways to optimize increased investment and ensure value, especially in a challenging macroeconomic environment.

“We’ve seen a lot of top technology companies announce layoffs in late 2022. It’s likely that none of these companies are laying off their most talented machine learning personnel,” Gutman suggested to TechNewsWorld.

However, to make up for the shortfall of fewer people in deep technical teams, companies will need to lean even further into automation to maintain productivity and ensure projects get completed. He also expects to see companies that use ML technology put in place more systems to monitor and conduct performance and make more data-driven decisions on how to manage ML or data science teams.

“With clearly defined goals, these technical teams will need to be more key performance indicator-focused, so leadership can have a more in-depth understanding of machine learning’s ROI. Gone are the days of vague benchmarks for ML,” Gutman said. .

end of talent hoarding

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become common in the last decade. Those working with ML are likely the most recent employees, as opposed to employees who have been working with AI for a long time.

Many big tech companies started hiring these types of workers because they could handle the financial cost and keep them away from competitors — not necessarily because they were needed, Gutman said.

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“From this perspective, it is not surprising to see so many ML workers being laid off given the surplus within large companies. However, with the era of ML talent hoarding coming to an end, it could usher in a new wave of innovation and opportunity for startups,” he observed.

With so much talent now looking for work, he expects to see many displaced workers move out of big tech and into small and medium-sized businesses or startups.

Cloud Predictions

Drew Firmant, vice president of enterprise strategies at Pluralsight, believes that fundamental cloud computing skills will continue to be the most relevant and in-demand worker needs for 2023. This is despite ML and AI getting the most attention.

According to Pluralsight’s State of the Cloud report, 75% of tech leaders are building all new products and features in the cloud. Yet he noted that only 8% of technologists have significant cloud-related skills and experience.

Ironically, lower-level cloud infrastructure skills will continue to be in high demand because using those technologies successfully requires more people than higher-level services, said Mattias Andersen, Pluralsight’s lead developer advocate.

“For example, many organizations now want to own and manage their own Kubernetes clusters, allowing them to hire for Kubernetes administration skills while they offload to a cloud provider,” Anderson told TechNewsWorld. “

tech talent shift

Firmant said an expected shift from consumers of talent to creators of talent will be a key differentiator for cloud leaders in 2023. Gartner reports that 50% of enterprise cloud migrations will be delayed by two years or more due to cloud skills shortages – directly impacting the ability of enterprises to achieve cloud maturity and achieve a return on their technology investment.

“To address the challenges of cloud adoption, enterprises must invest in migrating their talent to the cloud as much as they are investing in migrating their applications,” Firmant told TechNewsWorld. “Lift-and-shift migration strategies limit the benefits of cloud platforms, and the approach doesn’t work well for workforce transformation.”

He urged that in order to achieve a sustainable transformation towards cloud adoption and maturity, enterprises need to invest strategically in skill development programs designed to achieve cloud adoption at critical mass.

Multi-Cloud Adoption

Avoiding vendor lock-in is an important target for 2023. According to Anderson, this is the strategy that is now prevalent across the industry landscape. More enterprises are adopting multi-cloud, either by design or by accident.

“The increase in multi-cloud adoption will accelerate demand for the tools needed to manage the increased complexity as enterprises struggle to reduce their implementation timelines. The trifecta of multi-cloud challenges and solutions in 2023 will include security, cost and operations,” said Anderson.

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This, he said, would force another need on multi-cloud strategies. Technologists must become multilingual between two or more cloud providers.

He predicted, “With the current shortage of cloud talent, the multi-cloud strategy trend is expected to add further stress to the existing skills gap.”

open-source role

The focus on ML operations, management and governance will force MLOPS teams to do more with less. According to Gutman, businesses 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 need to consider open-source infrastructure rather than being locked into long-term contracts with cloud providers. While organizations doing ML at hyper-scale can certainly benefit from integration with their cloud providers, it forces these companies to work the way the provider wants them to work,” he added. Explained.

This means users may not be able to do what they want the way you want, he warned. This also puts users at the mercy of the cloud provider for cost escalations and upgrades.

On the other hand, open source provides flexible customization, cost savings, and efficiency. Users can even modify the open-source code to make sure it works exactly as they want.

Gutman concluded, “especially with teams shrinking in technology, it’s becoming a more viable option.”