#117 2022 In Review

On today’s episode,
a look back at 2022.
Hey, today it’s just me on the podcast
talking about the big trends
that we saw in 2022,
especially on our podcast.
And it was really kind of fun to go back
and take a look at all
the different podcasts
that we did over this last year
and find out, yeah,
where do we spend most of our time?
And I actually had a lot of fun doing this
because it brought back
memories of people I interviewed.
We did eight executive interviews
this last year,
great interviews
with former CEOs, CTOs, CEOs.
It was wonderful talking to them
about their experience in managing
organizations through technology
transformations and and all the above.
And in those interviews
and several other interviews that we did,
we found six really major trends
that we saw in 2022.
The trends are here you go.
Drum roll, please.
Hybrid workspace,
cybersecurity, cloud technology,
edge computing, data management,
and of course, the one that everyone’s
thinking about, artificial intelligence.
We’re still waiting for the,
you know, the the A.I.
to take over the world.
Hasn’t happened yet.
Don’t think it will in 2023.
But we saw an emergence
of some really cool AI tools in 2022.
Let’s dive right into each one of these
and let’s start with probably
the most profound thing that we saw in
At the beginning of 2022,
it was just getting out of COVID.
People were starting
to go back to the office.
There were a lot of fits and starts
on that because of outbreaks and caution.
And but during COVID,
it moved really fast.
They move really fast to get people
working from home at Starbucks,
in cabins in the mountains. It was crazy.
People were working
from all over the place
and people started
going back into the office.
So we needed this real flexibility
on, Hey, where is my work?
Is my work just on my laptop?
Is it up in the cloud?
Is it in virtual
desktops, in VDI, in my data center or in
It was it was an interesting
time to see what was going on.
At the same time,
we saw a lot of pressure,
a lot of pressure from cost pressures
on a decrease.
It cost because during COVID we kind of
let it costs run a little rampant
because we wanted people working so
that we can continue the business growing.
This was great for I.T.
They were able to move very quickly
and got the funding that they needed.
But 2022 saw a pullback
a little bit on that.
We got to control costs.
We still need to move fast like we did,
and we showed that
we could during the pandemic,
but we also needed
to put some controls in place so we didn’t
blow things out of proportion.
We didn’t, you know, blow, blow
the budget on everything.
So it was an interesting time in 2020
to have lots of podcast
episodes on the normal getting back
to the new normal and what that means
and cultural change during the pandemic
and how that affected everyone.
Go back and listen to
those are fascinating
discussions that we had with people
from several different industries
inside Intel as well as outside of Intel
in government and industry.
It was really fascinating.
Another major trend that we saw was cloud
computing,
another uptick in cloud computing,
more people moving to the cloud.
And we also saw a big surge
in regional clouds,
smaller cloud service providers
that are more a little bit more boutique
and can provide different services than
the big global cloud service providers.
And we saw people moving to them
because as from reliability,
we had several
cloud outages in the major CSPs this year.
I think the massive growth got a little
in front of them, a little bit.
Also, the cloud service
providers of global ones were moving up
the stack into new SAS
and Paths platforms, which
they maybe weren’t architected completely.
Great. So we ran into some problems.
There were some outages that caused
some major outages
for for large companies.
So we started seeing also these companies
look at not just putting all their eggs
into one cloud service provider,
but into multiple cloud service providers
and also on their own data centers
in private cloud, we saw an interesting
uptick in private cloud.
We’re seeing a lot of rumors around
Broadcom buying VMware,
which is the largest
private cloud software vendor, VMware.
And we saw some competitors
make some really strong
footholds in the private cloud space.
And competition is always good.
We like competition because it improves
the technology and the offerings
and possibly will decrease in price
in the private cloud.
So the multi hybrid cloud really started
to take its form this last year
because of some faltering that we saw
in the typical cloud service providers.
Another thing that we saw
that people were a little bit shocked of,
we had three episodes on this alone
was controlling costs in the cloud.
A lot of people see this sticker shock
when they first
get their first monthly cloud bill
and they’re like, Oh my goodness,
that was more than what I expected.
There are a lot of
there are a lot of nuances to cloud costs,
especially when it comes to egress
and network.
Network costs.
Those things
tend to get people a little off guard
because they’re not quite
used to the change
in operating that you do when you move to
a cloud service providers.
A lot of people
that got stuck with really large
cloud bills were the lift and shift.
I’m just going to lift
what I have shift in the cloud
and and work like normal day.
They typically ran into higher costs
in what they expected.
So again, we see cloud strategy
really taking place in 2022, really
that multi hybrid cloud as options
that people are looking for.
Now, another really big trend that we saw
in 2022 was edge computing.
And as the edge has become more capable,
we can do really crazy things on the edge.
Now because there’s so much compute power
in these small form factors
and low wattage that we’re starting
to see more capabilities out to the edge,
which means we have a lot
of really interesting things
going on out there
like t operational technology and i.t.
Information technology,
convergence is starting to happen
where i’m moving data across
those typically air gapped boundaries
and that
in itself has caused a whole bunch
of interesting problems in cybersecurity,
which we’ll get to later.
And we’re certainly seeing it across
multiple verticals health care,
manufacturing, energy
production, transportation.
We’re starting to see
the promises of industry
for auto really starting
to take
really starting to come come about.
It’s really starting to happen.
It’s not moving as fast as we had hoped.
But I think that the emergence of private
And we saw some of the private 5G
offerings happen this year,
which is great with Flex
Ran and things like that,
a lot more flexible.
The barriers to entry into private
than it is for 4G
and other technologies like that.
So edge computing
I think is going to be big again
in 2023 and 2024.
Now that I have all my data scattered
in the cloud, in the data center
and out on the edge everywhere, guess what
the next major thing that we saw this
last year, and I think it’s an emerging,
it’s very nascent right now.
You’re right, it’s data management.
So data management took a major,
major role this last year
and people are still trying to grasp it.
They’re trying to get their head around it
because my data is now
scattered everywhere.
And so how do I manage all that data?
How do I protect all that data,
and then how do I classify that data?
So those are kind of the
the four key pillars of data management
that we saw location,
classification, governance and protection.
On the classification
side, we’re seeing organizations
being I don’t know what the right word is
burdened with data
classification because of regulation.
There’s a lot of regulations
around data privacy.
That means I have to do a better job
at classifying my data, making sure
that who has access to my data
and the right data
at the right time also ties in to that,
which is data governance, right?
Who has access for how long,
and then how long do I need to keep
keep that data
under this specific classification?
And then the fourth pillar,
of course, is protection.
Really interest
staying interesting and growth
in data protection specifically around
confidential computing.
So if you don’t know
what confidential computing is,
we had like four podcasts
on confidential computing.
Really fascinating stuff.
It’s protecting our data in use.
So encrypting our data while we’re using
our data in the CPU and protecting it from
from attacks, cyber attacks and threats,
keeping my secrets secret
and not out on disk and things like that.
Some really cool technology
around encryption
encryption in silicon.
So that gives us the ability to encrypt in
use at rest and in transit.
So take a look at those
those podcasts on confidential computing,
great,
great new technology is like SGX and tDCS,
of course by Intel are available
there that really open the doors to that.
And the great news is some of the cloud
service providers have adopted
those technologies and other technologies
around confidential computing.
So it’s now available
to try out in the cloud.
And then also you can buy it
in your own data centers, too.
So really interesting stuff
around this data management concept.
Now the next the next one
and probably in fact,
it was the one that had the most episodes
this year
in 2022 was cybersecurity.
We had oh, 18 to 20 AI.
Some of them were fudged a little bit
because we ended up
talking about cybersecurity,
even though the topic may have been
data management
because cybersecurity plays everywhere.
But there were 18 to
and wow, incredible episodes.
Everything.
Everything from ransomware attacks
to thwarting ransomware attacks to
new ways of looking at micro segmentation
for protection and firewall management.
Really interesting things.
All of us circling around the big buzz
word of the day
is zero trust architecture.
I know we’ve all heard it.
It’s a big buzzword,
it’s a marketing term, but
zero trust architecture
principles are real
and they’re starting to be used
more and more.
So this is something
we most definitely want to keep an eye on.
We saw a lot this year in Zero Trust.
Everyone says they have zero trust.
Look at the principles.
It’s not just an architecture.
It’s also has to do with process
improvement that you need to put in place.
It’s a new way of thinking about
security in the cloud,
in your data center
and also on the edge as well.
Also, we saw major breaches
in ransomware attacks in security,
critical infrastructure,
security was attacked heavily this year.
The war between the Ukraine
and Russia unleashed
a bunch of cyber attacks during that war
on each country
and also our allies to those countries.
So really interesting to see how
cyber security and cyber warfare
is going to play
with physical warfare
in conjunction in the future.
Interestingly enough,
a lot of surveys were done this last year
on cyber security.
Number one,
threat number one attack, phishing.
It still remains the primary attack vector
because humans are involved.
I myself have fallen.
I’ve fallen to the phishing attacks
that are it
department does on its own employees.
So I’ve had to take the training
a couple of times
because I said, Oh,
that looks really interesting.
I think we all kind of fall for that.
Sometimes.
Got to be more careful.
So we have to be cautious of the
phishing attacks that are out there.
And then probably the most notarized
or our of those famous
things that happened this year
where software supply chain attacks,
we had log forge with vulnerabilities
that were exposed.
Right.
That was huge because
almost everyone uses log for G
and it caught a lot of i.t organizations
and software development organizations
a little off,
off foot,
maybe on their back foot a little bit
because they weren’t
sure if they had log, forge or not.
So we saw a big huge cry for
we need software bill of materials
when you’re delivering software
or using software.
And there’s been some standards groups
that have come up like ECF
s bomb group, the software bomb group
that have come up with some standards
around
software bombs,
how to use them, how to produce them
so that we can get a better idea
of where we do have vulnerabilities
in our workloads, in our infrastructure,
both in the cloud, on the edge
and in the data center.
So cybersecurity will continue
to be big in 2023.
Kind of check out my next episode
where I go in
depth on 2023 what I think the big items
will be that year
and we’ll get some feedback
from you guys, my listeners
too, to see what you think about that.
Now the last one
and probably the coolest one, right?
Because it’s bleeding edge stuff.
No, it’s not Quantum computing.
There were some inroads in quantum,
but artificial intelligence
AI that that was a big one.
This last year.
We did several episodes on the podcast
about it.
Probably the biggest news in
AI this last year and towards
the end of the year was open A.I.
releasing Chat GB t
Pig. You know, I played around with it
a little bit.
It’s pretty cool, I have to admit,
and it possibilities of it.
My brain are just starting to wrap around
what can I really do with this thing?
And it’s pretty impressive.
So a generalized solution like that
that I can use
in several different things,
even maybe even responding
to your comments on my podcast,
my come from Chat GB t,
I don’t know, we’ll have to wait and see,
but it can also help write code.
It can help.
There’s a lot of things in chat Gee GB t
that we’re seeing interesting things now.
Also this last year
we saw a huge uptick in AI silicon chips.
So these are chips, neuromorphic computing
chips that are available
to purchase
and or rent from the cloud
service providers
where many of the cloud service
providers have adopted
neuromorphic computing as an offering
where it is so screaming fast
when it comes to training and inference
and things like that,
much faster
even than the GPUs at a lower wattage.
Those are now available in the cloud
or for purchasing your own data center.
And some of the wattage is even so small
that we can push it down into edge
devices.
We’re talking 2 to 5 watts type of thing.
So really cool stuff for the Edge
and A.I.
chips that came out this this year.
Also, we’re starting to see organizations
move out of using
AI in a science experiment
into operationalizing AI
in their day to day
workflows that they’re doing in their
in their day
to day business that they have.
So that’s another major uptick.
And we’re feeling
the growing pains around operationalizing
A.I..
We’re starting to see the emergence of
AI ops, just like DevOps.
We’ve got air ops
and we’re seeing and we’re bumping up
against some of the rough edges.
It’ll get polished off, Will will grow
over the next couple of years
in the air space as it becomes
more readily available and operational.
I so I can, I can churn out
a I applications more readily.
Now another thing that we saw
and this is really interesting
is we saw new types of cyber attacks.
Again, cyber cyber security comes up,
but new types of cyber attacks on A.I.
and and A.I.
because A.I.
has more moving parts than a typical
application,
because I have my application,
I also have my data
that’s driving the application
and the data that I’m analyzing
and the data them spitting out.
So lots of moving parts there.
And a lot of times with A.I.,
I’m dealing with the real world.
There’s been some interesting
AI attacks that we’ve seen
that are attacking both the model
by changing parts of the model
or attacking the model
through the input coming in
by sending different types of disruption
into those input data streams.
We’re starting to see the AI models
miss things and things.
So cyber attacks and I are increasing.
Research is being done on this
to how that’s worked out as well.
So I hope your 2022 was a good year.
It was a transformational year
for a lot of people.
I think we saw that in the tech markets
as tech kind of stumbled a little bit
this last year
as far as we had this big, huge
two years of just spending like crazy
to keep every everything going.
And we had what I would call
a typical drawback after that.
And we had some stumbles,
but we absolutely do.
The chip shortage being one of those
stumbles, which
we continue to go through, the chip
shortage, especially on edge devices.
The automotive industry, for example,
is still has a major
chip shortage
that we’re trying to get through still.
But 2023
I think will be an interesting year.
I think it’s another transition year.
I’m hoping towards the end of the year
we’ll see this massive
growth in these technologies
and maybe more.
But check out my next podcast episode
where we’ll go more in
depth in what I see coming in 2023.