Gartner recently issued its technology trends for 2023 – and it’s always exciting to take a look forward. While these high level 2023 technology trends may not materialize overnight in the daily life of ITOps, they do offer some guidance when planning for innovation. This blog post provides a quick overview on some of these trends and for good measure, additional information on how to fine-tune your infrastructure strategy for 2023 to support your CIO’s goals of sustainable, scalable, and optimized digital operations.
Evolving technologies for a changing world
Unsurprisingly, a context of energy and economic restrictions – not to mention the climate crisis, drives the need for technologies that enable operational and performance optimization, as well as energy and cost savings. Higher expectations for sustainability are finally reaching digital operations, a key theme that also affects technological innovation and the adoption of new work tools for ITOps.
An insightful, complimentary download to help with 2023 infrastructure planning
We were recently discussing how ITOps can better plan for sustainable and cost-effective infrastructure, and are now providing access, for a limited time only, to a complimentary Gartner® report: “Hype CycleTM for Infrastructure Strategy,” which may assist in aligning to new expectations.
What’s important to remember is that hybrid delivery models are emerging, blurring the boundaries between infrastructure, management, cloud, sourcing, and virtualization models, as I&O leaders seek to make teams more product-driven and build strategies that can easily be duplicated across a range of use cases.
Download Gartner’s® Hype CycleTM for Infrastructure Strategy for additional guidance in planning for IT infrastructure.
A broader perspective for the next 36 months
If you’re looking for a broader perspective on the 2023 technology trends, have a look at Gartner’s top picks. Although these are high-level trends, a similar pattern is emerging: rather than bouncing back from the pandemic, business leaders are instead facing a global recession, inflation, material and skills shortages, and higher energy costs. This year’s top technology trends present the leverages leaders can activate to promote businesses competitiveness, but also sustainable business activities – including sustainable IT, over the longer run.
Organized in four themes, optimize, scale, pioneer, and sustainable technology, the 10 top trends are:
- Digital immune system
- Applied Observability
- AI trust, risk and security management (AI TRiSM)
- Industry cloud platforms
- Platform engineering
- Wireless-value Realization
- Superapps
- Adaptive AI
- Metaverse
A few of these trends and themes caught my attention, so I’m going to briefly discuss some of them.
Digital immune system (DIS)
A digital immune system is a set of practices and tools to improve the quality and resilience of business-critical systems organizations need to invest in to make the business more resilient. An organization’s digital immune system will encompass apps supply chain security, site reliability engineering, and auto remediation capabilities.
According to Gartner, a robust DIS strategy starts by a thorough assessment of which business capabilities are to be prioritized for such investments. The analyst recommends the creation of communities of practice (CoPs) to share on best practices as well as intensified collaboration between DevOps, SecOps, and ITOps.
“By 2025, organizations that invest in building digital immunity will increase customer satisfaction by decreasing downtime by 80%.”
Gartner
IT monitoring finds its place in 2023’s strategies to reinforce the business’s digital immunity system (DIS), as a key component of the observability stack.
Applied observability
Speaking of observability… Applied observability is “the applied use of observable data in a highly orchestrated and integrated approach across business functions, applications and I&O teams” (Gartner). It opens the door to a deepening of data intelligence practices, which are truly instrumenting observability data. The idea is to develop potential business use cases for such metadata, to enable AI applications and power-up data-driven business decisions.
Logs are among that observable data, along with traces, API calls, dwell time, downloads, file transfers, etc. The opportunity is to exploit the data as a competitive advantage, ensuring decision makers but also application developers, and other stakeholders have access to the right data at the right time, to make faster decisions, and develop new business opportunities, services or products. Gartner says organizations should consider observable data as their most monetizable asset. To achieve applied observability, you need all layers of the observability stack well in place, from applications to infrastructure layers.
Source: 2023 Gartner® Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends
AI trust, risk and security management (AI TRiSM)
“Gartner expects that by 2026, organizations that operationalize AI transparency, trust and security will see their AI models achieve a 50% result improvement in terms of adoption, business goals, and user acceptance.” What it takes to make AI safe and effective.
AI TRiSM is about keeping AI models under control. A Gartner survey revealed that organizations have deployed hundreds or thousands of AI models, some of which IT leaders can’t explain or interpret. AI TRiSM is an ongoing initiative to manage AI risk, not only ensuring proper knowledge and understanding of these models, but also being aware when AI is misperforming. The objective is to be transparent about AI and ensure it is working as intended. Left unmanaged, AI risk can negatively impact data security and privacy, contaminate the decision-making process, tarnish corporate reputation, and result in financial loss. Malfunctioning AI models may even be harmful to individuals.
This emerging field is driving collaboration among multiple profiles within the organization, spanning legal and compliance-minded professionals, SecOps, ITOps, and data analysts, who continuously ensure they have the processes, practices, and tools enabling AI model interpretability and explainability, while safeguarding the security and privacy of the organization’s and customer’s data.
Platform engineering
Platform engineering is all about improving DevOps experience and productivity through self-service tools and automated infrastructure operations. This helps businesses in turn to speed up innovation projects and retire value from them faster.
The fact is, DevOps are dealing with increasingly complex software architectures and so comes the need to provide a seamless platform which provides common, reusable tools and capabilities. A product onto themselves, such platforms can also be leveraged by data scientists or a range of end user profiles. The idea is that such a curated platform would contain seamless access, in a self-service fashion, to all the tools and capabilities needed to accelerate workflows and product deployments, while also enforcing consistency and efficiency.
Sustainable technology as an all-encompassing theme
Sustainable technology obviously cannot be just a trend—it now has to be built in how technology is being delivered. CIOs are now participating in an organization’s ESG’s efforts through adopting tools and practices that increase the energy efficiency, but also the broad performance of IT services.
One key action recommended by Gartner is to favor sustainable IT by increasing the energy and material efficiency of IT infrastructure and workplace services. So in closing, I’m reminding you that our IT monitoring software comes with built-in IT energy measurement features and recommendations for easy-to-implement energy consumption and cost optimization measures.
If you’re looking for an IT monitoring solution that will adapt to the next wave of technological change in your organization and that can help you deliver IT sustainability, contact us for a demo today.
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