Driving these trends are the global talent crunch, escalating cybersecurity threats and urgent ESG and data governance priorities
Here are five predictions for 2023 culled from our research and insights, in the areas of community collaboration; open source security and usage; stream processing technology; and sustainability.
Firstly, with businesses continuing to emphasize innovation and transformation, the onus has fallen on those within the industry to reinvent, reskill and upskill themselves. To keep up with customer demands firms will remain on the lookout for talent to develop and evolve existing products, and accelerate their time to market.
Today’s interconnected economies are giving rise to increasing number of cross-border projects and employment opportunities that will in turn engender the rise of the open source community. These communities or user groups will increase the ability for developers to learn new skills like additional programming and coding languages, allowing them to reskill themselves and, in turn, give back to the open source community.
This is a reflection of the ongoing Web 3.0 movement, where information is decentralized and not controlled by any one corporation or government but by the wider participants in that community.
It will be in the community’s best interest to help other members upskill, reskill, learn, and grow so that they can also contribute to the ongoing refinement of information. This will also give rise to a new breed of coding specialists that are proficient in multiple coding languages and product development.
Automation as a catalyst
The Asia Pacific region is faced with the twin threats of both a cybersecurity talent crunch and a more volatile, growing cyber threat landscape. The region is facing a shortfall of more than two million professionals and it is estimated that the region will spend more than US$31bn on cybersecurity.
This is where automation comes into play, and it could be a major key to keeping businesses secure. Automation tools can help IT teams quickly identify and rectify code vulnerabilities and more.
Alternatively, all cybersecurity and automation tasks and responsibilities can be outsourced to third parties. The increasing reliance on automation is predicted to cause businesses to turn to the open source community for help when it comes to testing products, addressing security issues, rolling out patches and making them more secure.
APAC cloud trends
More enterprises in the region are slated to adopt cloud computing solutions in the coming years. We will see a continued shift towards deeper specialization. This essentially involves the building of specialist industry cloud platforms on top of existing managed cloud services: to help accelerate problem solving, bring everything closer together, and open up more flexible, agile ways of managing workloads and accelerating innovation.
The growth and commoditization of industry cloud platforms will drive more standards and open source adoption, especially in relation to managed services.
The true value of these industry cloud platforms will be delivering deeper industry expertise and facilitating hyper specialization.
Trending: Kafka adoption and governance
Organizations have begun to leverage their own internal or customer data and also data from the community and eco-system for a multiplier effect.
The need to be able to seamlessly connect these multiple data sources will be key if organizations aim to translate the data they possess into valuable insights for growth. This will in turn give rise to greater adoption of event streaming tools and services, especially as real-time data management becomes an even bigger priority for organizations looking to manage and consolidate data sources and workloads.
As more organizational and customer data flow through Kafka clusters, there will be a greater need for visibility among which teams have access to streaming data. At the same time, being able to access and re-use existing data will fuel further innovation, refinement of business processes and better customer services.
With greater Kafka adoption, the conversation around data governance, security and compliance within Kafka will also follow. Solutions are already starting to emerge, which have enabled firms to build an open-source community that will ensure governance among teams involved in Kafka workloads.
ESG compliance and the Cloud
Our final prediction is that, as more firms adopt the cloud computing and increase cloud spending, CIOs will have to lead the charge to ensure sustainability of the cloud services — with metrics in place to justify organizational environmental, social and governance (ESG) compliance.
Ongoing ESG legislation is constantly being reviewed, and it is every firm’s responsibility to audit its value and supply chains to ensure ESG compliance. Firms will need to demonstrate to the authorities that even their partners and suppliers, including their cloud service providers, are abiding by ESG.
In 2023, firms will need to be judicious with their cloud use to meet employee, investor and consumer ESG expectations without greenwashing. There will also be increased calls for firms to be able to justify their ESG compliance with standardized metrics. As on-premises setups do not lend themselves well to crunching and developing these standardized metrics, firms will need to work with cloud service providers to produce these metrics in a timely and cost effective manner.
The cumulative effect of all these factors will elevate the CIO as a key figure within organizations to coordinate and calibrate ESG initiatives.
