IT Trends 2023: Mainstream trends you should look for next year

It’s the time of the year where everyone spends more time thinking and talking about trends and what to expect next year. Frequently, reports on IT trends focus on cutting-edge technologies such as the metaverse and innovative business technology solutions like quantum computing that share a fantastic potential and attract the interest of large, “big bet” players and their markets.

There is plenty to chew on at that level. However in addition to our large enterprise clients, we at Celsior work with many mid-market and smaller-scale enterprise clients and see a critical set of more mainstream trends worthy of discussion. These are growth imperatives for organizations and important for organizational success.

Accordingly, the following are five key trends for 2023. We’ll then elaborate on each of them with a series of more detailed blogs over the next few months.

Trend #1: Optimizing IT for reliability and resilience

Companies are looking for inexpensive, and more efficient means of achieving IT reliability and resilience. With so many resources devoted to operations and troubleshooting, tech debt has too often throttled reliability and resilience measures. Foundational IT optimization will help organizations achieve resilience –cost-effectively through a variety of measures. These block and tackle measures include improved application tiering and service level clarity, vulnerability and security hardening, and capacity/utilization/performance optimization. Through selective investments in these IT fundamentals, companies will make their core systems more robust and will be able to shift budget toward application innovation. We will look more closely in our next blog at the drivers for this IT trend and explore the actions and tactics to address it.

Trend #2: Expanding Use of Cloud-Based Models

Whereas initial use of the cloud was frequently based on a lift-and-shift model with more limited use of cloud native capabilities, we will see more mainstream use of the cloud for elasticity and bursting for seasonal demands, dynamic environments, etc. Furthermore, as the cloud offerings from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google mature, they continue to offer additional, standardized cloud services such as security event and incident management, large-scale data backup, disaster recovery, and machine learning. As part of the alignment between costs and use, SaaS models will continue to take over the market with Gartner predicting that 75% of all direct-to-consumer companies will offer subscription services by 2023. In our third blog, we’ll examine the costs and benefits of these capabilities and how organizations will be more fully taking advantage of cloud enablement.

Trend #3: Improving Data-Driven Decision Making

Data-driven decision making will continue to evolve in 2023. Newer generations of knowledge workers, moving up into leadership and management ranks, grew up with “data at their fingertips” and expect to make data-based decisions. Real-time, cloud-based data warehouses and data lakes that are accessible through executive dashboards and more sophisticated analytics tools will support this growing culture of data-driven decision making. In some cases, orchestration layers will also be used to create a single version of data from different distributed sources. Of course, AI and machine learning continue to become more mainstream. IoT, enabled through 5G as well as more traditional networking, promises to be a major data generator and feeder to the data warehouses, data lakes, and machine learning engines. All of this and more will be covered in our blog on the data-driven enterprise.

Trend #4: Always On business models

“Always on” has been widely used in the IT world for the past 20 years. So how can it be a trend? The simple answer is that in the past “always on” was for mission critical applications that demanded the specialized, expensive hardware and support necessary to make it happen. In contrast, “always on” is now becoming the expectation for nearly all IT.

The hybrid workplace and web have eliminated the concept of business hours. Not only do customers expect a 24×7 customer experience, employees also expect a similar 24×7 employee experience. Of course, it’s not sufficient to have 24×7 services that are only available 95% of the time. App availability targets are increasing across all application tiers. Our blog on always-on will cover these customer and employee drivers and cost-effective means through which these needs are being met.

Trend #5: Creative Ways of Addressing Critical IT Skills Shortages

Amidst financial headwinds and talk of recession, most people expected that the great resignation and staffing shortages would evaporate. However, this is not the case. The job market remains tight—particularly in hot areas like artificial intelligence, machine learning, 5G, cybersecurity, and IT automation. The market is also tight in areas facing significant retirements like mainframe operations and modernization. If finding the right talent is difficult, it is even more challenging for companies trying to meet goals for diversity and inclusion.

To meet these challenges, companies will be turning to FTE to Virtual Time Employee (VTE) enablement, maturing global/hybrid delivery models, and managed services models. To meet diversity goals, companies are leveraging innovative programs for both training and post-hire support of personnel from historically disadvantaged groups. In our final blog of the series, we’ll examine how companies will be leveraging these new models to meet resourcing needs.

Keep following this space to read the full series on 2023 mainstream IT trends and what they will mean for you and your organization.

This is the first blog of a series on IT Trends 2023. Check back regularly to see additional blogs on this topic:

Blog #2: IT Trends 2023 | 1st Trend – Optimizing IT for Reliability and Resilience
Blog #3: IT Trends 2023 | 2nd Trend – Expanding Use of Cloud-Based Models