#117 2022 Year In Review
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on 2023-01-05 00:00:00 +0000
with Darren W Pulsipher,
In this episode Darren reviews 2022. He identifies the most talked about topics on the podcast in 2022 including Data Management, Artificial Intelligence, Cyber Security, Edge Computing, and Hybrid Workspaces.
Keywords
#riskmanagementpolicies #cybersecurity #multicloud #zerotrust
2022 was a banner year for embracing digital transformation, with an uptick in listeners and several external guests interviewed this year. Eight guests were executives or former executives of government agencies and private sector organizations, including finance, manufacturing, and healthcare. In over 60 episodes, six topics emerged as necessary to our listeners and in the industry as a whole, namely: Hybrid workspaces, cybersecurity, multi-hybrid cloud, edge computing, data management, and artificial intelligence.
Hybrid Workspace
After fighting COVID restrictions and keeping companies running in 2020 and 2021, organizations looked at optimizing the “New Normal” operating mode. This new normal decreased the bureaucratic impediments of pre-COVID days. However, controls and processes around the rapid pace of change during the pandemic to control costs and improve reliability began to emerge. Companies struggled with remote work policies as we saw organizations quickly switch between work-at-home, hybrid work, and everyone-in-the-office approaches, leaving IT organizations with complex workspace solutions. They began to develop architectures that could handle rapid change and flexible working models to handle constantly changing policies. Are flexible hybrid workspaces here to stay? Only the next couple of years will tell.
Multi-Hybrid Cloud
Another big trend in 2022 was the migration and the repatriation of workloads to and from the cloud as organizations scammer to provide hybrid workspaces for their employees. IT organizations began to look at the operational costs of running and migrating workloads to the cloud. Many organizations found the lift and shift methodology of moving to the cloud was much more costly than initially estimated due to a lack of requirements gathering, understanding of cloud operating models, and understanding primarily egress network costs in the cloud.
The rapid adoption of the cloud during the pandemic left many global cloud service providers flat-footed in providing the high-reliability organizations required, overwhelming several cloud service providers and causing significant outages across the global CSP ecosystem. Many organizations started looking at multi-hybrid cloud architectures to improve reliability, decrease cost, and increase the predictability of workloads running across multiple private and public clouds. Regional cloud service providers took advantage of the stumble of the global cloud service providers. They provided higher reliability and boutique services in the SaaS and PaaS cloud offerings, competing head-to-head with the larger CSPs.
Edge Computing and Industry 4.0
Industry 4.0 continue to make inroads into manufacturing and has a worker shortage force the hands of many organizations to look to automation to continue their operations. Additionally, OT and IT data began converging as organizations looked to optimize their business and operational processes. Advancements in CPU and storage technology moved more computing to the edge, making edge devices more intelligent and capable of performing tasks previously done in the data center. Connectivity between edge devices, data centers, and public clouds improved with the adoption of private 5G technologies across the sector. However, adoption still needs to catch up to previous predictions due to concerns about OTC cybersecurity. This is especially true around critical infrastructure management.
Data Management
Hybrid workspaces, cloud adoption, and edge computing have created a data management nightmare for most organizations as their data has been spread across these somewhat disconnected and distributed environments. to manage data across this ecosystem effectively, new architectures began to emerge, including data mesh, distributed data lakes, and data networks. Organizations began to focus on four key data elements: location, classification, governance, and protection.
Privacy laws and regulations are driving organizations to correctly classify their data to protect the privacy of employees, customers, and constituents. Additionally, an uptick in cyber and ransomware attacks has forced organizations to better protect and govern their data in use, at rest, and in transit. Effectively managing who has access, how long they have access, and how long data resides is a critical element of data governance that organizations are beginning to understand.
Cyber Security
2022 was a big year for cyber security, and it showed in the podcast with over 18 episodes talking about cybersecurity. The year’s big buzzword was zero trust architecture, which has been turned into an overused marketing term. Instead of focusing on zero-trust architecture, Darren tends to concentrate on zero-trust principles that architectures can support.
Even with an increased emphasis on cybersecurity, there were primary data and infrastructure breaches this year, including critical infrastructure attacks. Many cyber professionals attribute this uptick to the war between Ukraine and Russia, as we saw the effectiveness of cyber warfare and physical warfare working in conjunction.
Another central concern in cybersecurity concerns the exposure of third-party software across the application ecosystem (log4J vulnerability). Many organizations need help finding direction due to the widely used log4J in their product offerings, back-office processing, and customer interfaces. A significant push for standardized software bill of materials to help identify vulnerabilities in software packages is being driven by several organizations and governments.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence continues to make improvements in techniques and operational processes. The big AI news of the year was ChatGBT, which has a wide range of uses, including writing blog posts, code, and papers and aiding IT help desk problems. Additionally, adopting AI silicon chips in the cloud service providers has expanded the availability of AI to the masses. This availability allows organizations to experiment more with AI algorithms in their day-to-day business operations. Organizations are starting to operationalize some of these experiments to run and automate processes previously performed by employees that are hard to find in a tight job market.
Conclusion
2022 was a rough year for many tech companies as we saw a decrease in IT spending over the previous “pandemic years of spending.” This expected downturn surprised many high-tech companies with how quickly things changed. Despite the downturn, technology continued to grow, and the adoption of new technologies in edge, cloud, AI, data management, and cybersecurity continues to grow. 2023 should be an exciting year as we see the maturation of some of these technologies. Organizations will continue investigating ways to decrease costs through automation, optimizing workloads across multi-hybrid clouds, and protecting against increased cyber security threats.