Top 4 Predictions for the New Year in Tech 2023

It’s 2023 and it’s time to review our top 4 predictions for the new year in tech!  Enjoy!

Evolving Technology Landscape & Resource Constraints Lay Gauntlet for IT

Keary Pence, Director of Product Marketing, Goliath Technologies The struggle between workers looking for more work/life balance via remote jobs and organizations looking to recreate the in-office culture, circa 2019, will heat up in 2023. As organizations grapple with the implications of this, they are left with few options but to lean into the hybrid IT infrastructure.

Just a few years ago, the consensus was that the pandemic would accelerate the inevitable shift to all things cloud and organizations would, in large part, abandon their on-prem delivery model. That turned out to be only partially true. There was an accelerated shift to cloud, however we’re not seeing a mass exodus from on-prem. In fact, we believe that organizations will still rely heavily on their on-prem infrastructure while also embracing multi-cloud as part of their go-forward IT strategy.

This opens the door to a myriad of concerns for IT, not the least of which is the expanded delivery infrastructure that includes on-prem and at least one, but more likely 2-3, cloud providers. Inevitably, IT must do more with less. Having visibility across a growing hybrid infrastructure and an expanding distributed workforce, plus a shortage of highly skilled IT professionals, will keep even the most seasoned IT leaders up at night.

Automation, data correlation, intelligent interpretation, troubleshooting & remediation – these are critical capabilities for IT teams to ensure they can continue to meet SLAs. The right tools will help IT tackle challenges and anticipate user experience issues before they happen, troubleshoot them quickly when they do, and provide analytics & reporting – identifying root cause so problems can be prevented in the future.

It’s all about Security Threats in 2023

Andy Syrewicze, Technical Evangelist, Hornetsecurity It’s hard to believe we’re already getting started with 2023.. As always with this time of year, it’s a good idea to do some reflecting and make some educated decisions about where we’re headed as a security community in the next year. While there is some commonality with previous years, there are some new threats to be aware of. These predictions are based off a Hornetsecurity analysis of 25+ billion emails.

To start with, we’re likely to an increase in charity fraud in the coming year. Any time there are highly impactful world events (such as the war in Ukraine) it’s almost a given that we’ll see some charity scams pop up around said event. End users need to be trained on how to identify these types of scams as they are relatively good at evading detection and usually contain a social engineering angle as well.

We’re also predicting an uptick in the targeting of end-users via Microsoft teams. Microsoft made a recent change in MS Teams that will make it much easier to communicate with external parties and federate with other organizations. This could effectively make Microsoft Teams the next frontier of end-user targeting. Businesses will need to be aware and adapt in the coming year.

Finally, we’re going to see an increase in the use of Deepfake technologies. Deepfake threats have been one of those technologies that have simultaneously seemed imminent and also far away, but the impact is already here. There has been an increase in Deepfake-enabled attacks in the past year due to advances in AI, and that trend is likely to continue. In fact, there have been some high-profile cases where threat-actors have attempted to pose as a company c-suite executive ordering the transfer of funds, or even apply for jobs with technical firms while using deepfake technologies in an attempt to gain internal access to the target organization. Again, organizations need to be educating end-users on these threats so they can be on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary.

Ransomware in 2023

Melissa Palmer, Content Creator, vMiss.net To me, it seems like 2022 was the year where organizations really started to get it.  There have been enough ransomware attacks in the news that organizations now realize it is a matter of time until they are the ones under attack.

Organizations are more prepared than ever to stop a ransomware attack in its tracks, catch it early, and if necessary, recover from it.

Unfortunately, threat actors still want to get paid.  This means threat actors will get more creative in their attack vectors (like having malware deploy ransomware, a recent trend that has emerged [T – link to the most recent post I wrote], and will ramp up attacks, going for quantity to make sure the find the people who didn’t belive they would come knocking.

If you haven’t gotten ready for the inevitable, teh time is now to ensure your assets are protected and you know how – and where – you will recover them to after an attack.

Computing and Communications Platform Changes

Gina Rosenthal, Founder, Digital Sunshine Solutions In 2023 we’ll see massive change not only with computing platforms, but also with communications platforms. It is clear that enterprises are not interested in migrating workloads to the cloud without a clear plan based on value to the business. It is still unclear how multi-cloud environments will be architected.

I believe we’ll continue to see offerings to help organizations build platforms that make it easier to manage infrastructure as code (IaC) efforts. These will mostly be available as SaaS applications, and will be marketing to the operations teams who are scrambling to build the platforms developers need to build flexible, scalable container-based applications.

At the same time, the social media platforms that marketers have depended on for the last decade are bracing for regulatory changes. Some of the most popular platforms seem to be crumbling completely. However, new community-based social media platforms are beginning to emerge.

Spaces like Mastadon and Discord create a way for individuals as well as organizations to own their platforms and the content on them. Community building and ad-based marketing both require funding. However, building communities takes time where ads are a quick fix if all you want are leads. Will marketers have the patience for this community driven outreach.

Like any other year, 2023 is bound to be an interesting year in the technology space. Check back in December when we see how our predictions went!