The looming economic recession is a tidal wave quickly intruding on the minds of leaders and individual contributors alike at this start of the new year.
“How much will my company have to change to survive financial uncertainty?”
“Will my job be there one day and gone the next?”
“Should we aim to simply survive until the market recovers?”
While it seems most logical to cut costs and halt new projects to remain afloat, investments in digital transformation will help propel businesses forward this year.
Check out these four digital transformation trends of 2023 and see how companies should adapt to not just tread water but to explore new islands of opportunity.
1. Intentional spending
Multi-cloud is not a new phenomenon. Over three-quarters of mid-sized companies have a multi-cloud strategy, which is expected to grow to 84% by 2023.1 The last few years have seen a surge in companies adopting a multi-cloud strategy and reaping the benefits, namely the vendor freedom, increased cloud agility and resilience, and a high-speed, low-latency architecture. What will change in 2023 is organizational spending around multi-cloud.
A complex and large-scale cloud ecosystem is expensive to maintain. This year, with organizations being more conscious about their spending, efforts toward cloud simplification may increase. While these efforts may incur a cost upfront, the resulting streamlined cloud solution will decrease costs and workloads across the company.
2. Surge in hyperautomation
"Building and maintaining a multi-cloud infrastructure is a daunting task. Only through automating the very management processes can we keep up. This requires rethinking how the automation stack needs to work. This is why we feel that Idem is the right approach to solve these issues."
--Tom Hatch, Creator of Idem Project
With viral hits ChatGPT and DALL-E sweeping the world, interest in AI and its uses in automating processes is surging. Companies of every sector will want to jump aboard the automation sensation and apply it to as many business operations as possible, a process known as hyperautomation. In fact, 80% of companies will include hyperautomation on their technology roadmaps within the next two years.2
However, companies must not be swept up in the excitement and forget the practical applications of whatever automation they’re investing in. It’s not an initiative to be taken on lightly, as 80% of leaders believe that automation is likely to plunge their organizations into technical debt.2
To successfully implement hyperautomation, technology and financial leaders must think deeply about how shifting their human workforce will ultimately boost efficiency. Plus, all automation efforts must be scalable and sustainable for long-term use. As automation technology improves over not just years, but from month to month, technology teams must be prepared with the time and expertise to continuously improve their automated solutions. Any lapses in updates could cause security risks or make the very expensive automation technology obsolete, wasting time, funds and energy.
A cloud automation platform is one such automation solution that saves organizations time and money. The more processes technology teams can entrust to a machine, the more energy and human brain power they can expend on value-add tasks.
3. Shift in cloud consumption due to data sovereignty
By the end of this year, it’s predicted that 75% of the world’s population will have their personal information protected by data privacy legislations.3 This overwhelming percentage will shift data sovereignty to more of a technical concern versus a predominantly legal matter. While on-premises storage is the most straight forward solution to data sovereignty laws like GDPR, APPs, CCPA and more, the benefits of cloud storage make it worth the legal and international finagling.
Internationally compliant cloud partners will be key in 2023. As data privacy laws become stricter, organizations must consider risk management when handling customer, client and employee data. The simplest possible cloud setup will be key in breaking down data silos. Additionally, idempotence is crucial to ensuring consistency.
4. Do more with less
While research conducted at the end of 2022 discovered that only 6% of companies planned to cut back on IT spending in 2023 … it’s a long year. IT and digital transformation efforts more than proved their worth in 2020, which likely accounts for this continued investment in IT even as 50% of companies plan to take cautionary measures in light of the economic slowdown.4
Any cost savings IT departments can report to finance will be welcomed with open arms in 2023. Thus, instead of hiring new employees, there may be an emphasis this year on IT employees pursuing advanced certifications, especially as junior admin tasks will be allocated to automated means.
Swim, don’t sink this year
Even though CFOs may be tempted to cut costs and maintain the status quo, markets are going to continue to evolve, fads will come and go, and new technologies are going to emerge. This is not the time to hibernate and mourn the short-lived economic boom. 2023 is the year to make strategic investments and rocket forward as the competition stands still.
Employ the help of Idem Project to streamline your cloud setup. Idem Project delivers Infrastructure as Data instead of as a mountain code, simplifying cloud maintenance, discovery and use. As a VMware partner, leaders can be confident in the security and soundness of the cloud platform documentation. Reach out today to learn more about Idem Project and how it’ll help your organization keep up with digital transformation trends this year.
1Krusche & Company, “Do you actually need a multi-cloud strategy?”
4Spiceworks Ziff Davis, “The 2023 State of IT”