Infrastructure security, which is also referred to as IT networking security, applies to all the modern enterprise technology stacks comprising hardware and software resources, including data centers and Cloud assets. These assets are considered the lifeline of any organization. Protecting these critical assets is protecting the organization itself from evolving cyber threats. According to the latest research, 44% of CISOs stated cloud and infrastructure security as their top priority in 2023. The rapid shift to Cloud environments has induced a greater sense of urgency among business leaders, particularly those involved in cybersecurity operations, to scale their efforts toward building a resilient enterprise infrastructure security in 2023. The findings were published in Insight Partners’Â second annual State of Enterprise Tech 2023 report.
We have gathered some of the key highlights on cybersecurity, data management, and infrastructure security, and how these would influence more innovations in digital experience, AI, and software engineering domains.
The Scope of Work is Expanding for CISOs
CISOs are overwhelmed by the massive influx of pre-trained unstructured data for AIops and cybersecurity-related capabilities. These capabilities are meant to catalyze bigger and faster digital transformations within the organization. Moreover, organizations are collecting and processing more data (most of which is unstructured) than ever before. Apart from managing and securing proprietary data and intellectual property (IP), enterprises are also required to reduce attack surfaces that are vulnerable to cyber threats, such as phishing and ransomware.
These have snowballed into a huge challenge for CISOs and their teams.
Security leaders are expected to adopt a Leapfrog strategy to turn to Modern Data Stack to accommodate the ever-growing processes involving AI and Machine Learning tools. As AI becomes the mainstream agenda for a majority of enterprises in 2023, CISOs foresee a definite increase in diversity and scale of work. This can be solely managed by investing more in Cloud and Infrastructure Security capabilities, which are getting costlier. CIOs are expected to spend more on their cybersecurity infrastructure in 2023 than they did in 2022. They have to either rely on their old trustworthy vendors and hope they are able to surf past cyber attacks. Or, choose a new vendor who can quickly identify newer threats and come up with innovative tailor-made solutions faster than others in the competition.
In short, CIOs and CISOs would have to deal with two challenges: i) manage a proportionally increasing workload with existing technology vendors, and ii) build a cost-optimized infrastructure security management strategy to maintain operational efficiencies in a secured environment.
Top Five Priorities for Enterprises in 2023
Cloud-first environments are challenging CISOs to look out for newer ways to manage infrastructure security frameworks. Clearly, in 2023, cloud and infrastructure security emerged as the most burning topic for enterprises with cloud-first or cloud-only architecture. Other priorities include threat and vulnerability management, identity and access management, data security, data governance, risks, and compliance management, and application security management.
The Shift to Cloud and SaaS Environments Stirring a Desert Storm in Security Industry
Misconfigured cloud settings can have grave security implications for enterprises that become a target for cybercriminals. Establishing a robust cloud platform security is the first step toward building an agile, digital-native enterprise. It empowers an organization to work in a trustworthy and controlled environment where data can be accessed through select cybersecurity capabilities, such as ZTNA, DevSecOps, Data Encryption, MFAs, ITDR, and others. In addition to the cloud security infrastructure, CISOs have to develop their capabilities in data governance, identity governance, administration, and app vulnerability detention and security testing. These are costly processes and they require a skilled workforce to manage the outcomes meaningfully.
Data & AI Influence Cybersecurity Investments in 2023
For CISOs, generative AI was nowhere in the scene last year! Within 10 months of its launch, generative AI is already moving mountains, or at least promising to do so, with every organization realigning their focus areas to build AI capabilities within their existing enterprise data stacks to achieve unprecedented results with little or no real cloud security backing. Moreover, AI practitioners are willing to test their underlying data infrastructure and see if they can handle AI workloads in real time and also deliver unmatched security to AI systems in terms of safety, trust, explainability, and responsibility!
59% of respondents mention their data and AI budgets have increased significantly in 2023 due to the sudden rise of generative AI capabilities. Decision-makers across the board are interested in uncovering the hidden capabilities of generative AI and using these capabilities to strike a finer balance between productivity and enterprise security risks.
That’s why CIOs and CISOs are reevaluating their data maturity and talent pool before making any kind of investments into data and AI tools in 2023.
Unsurprisingly, generative AI is a popular topic in this year’s report, appearing as a budget item for the first time. 15% of respondents ranked it among the most relevant aspects of their Data & AI for 2023. Priority areas related to Data and AI domains include MLops, Business intelligence, and modern data stack. In addition to these domains, AI experimentation is also a key activity that CISOs are willing to support using generative AI tools to improve infrastructure security and engineering mechanisms for threat intelligence, code generation, script optimization, and digital experience management.
Data Lakes All the Way!Â
Moving to the cloud was somewhat cheaper a few years ago. But now, CIOs are really concerned about the lack of control over the exploding cloud costs. Infrastructure management tools that can predict the costs before they bleed the finances are likely to become the mainstay in cloud management in the coming months.
Data Lakes, together with Orchestration and Observability are important parts of a fast-evolving data infrastructure that can take on varying workloads across diverse multiple environments. Organizations that have complex needs require strong data lakes to operationalize workloads related to AIOps, Big data analytics, Business Intelligence, IoT, and so on. In fact, major decisioning would be invested in business intelligence tools where predictive intelligence, interactive dashboarding, and AI-powered insights emerge as a powerful combination for driving revenue-boosting opportunities based on hyper-personalized conversations, and predictive threat assessments.
From an organization’s perspective, digital experience strategy is a prime actionable area, with customer experience emerging as the number one priority. In comparison to CX objectives, employee experience (EX) and enterprise automation pale out in 2023. However, this scenario could change very quickly as organizations become more familiar with the real capabilities of generative AI, and their own maturing data stacks. As LLMs for no-code and automation become smarter, RPA platforms could be pushed into oblivion, even as CIOs reject these platforms to optimize their tech budget and bring in more efficiencies into the system using generative AI.
What’s Shaping the Cloud Computing Landscape?
The cloud management landscape is largely influenced by the expanding SaaS sprawl and the internal silos that lead to “cloud chaos.”
A hybrid cloud strategy remains a dominant practice among maturing data-driven organizations. Many CIOs prefer to work with hybrid systems to control costs, maintain security, and achieve flexibility in their operations. 27% of respondents chose Hybrid Cloud Computing. An identical number of respondents chose Public Cloud services for their ongoing processes. 16% of respondents chose edge computing as a priority, followed by 12% of respondents that picked private cloud computing.
Priorities of adopting a hybrid cloud structure for the organization
Cloud management emerged as the number one priority among respondents who chose a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Hybrid cloud security, DevOps, and ITops followed behind cloud management priorities established with the modern hybrid infrastructures. It is worth pointing out that Platform Engineering and DevOps teams are working in sync to automate a bulk of cloud operations to achieve better efficiencies in a hybrid cloud landscape. That explains why there is so much attention on developing enterprise APIs that enable seamless integration across a number of SaaS tools hosted inside the cloud. Together with DevSecOps, APIs ensure security and governance are embedded into a modern cloud tech stack right from the onset.
Conclusion
In 2023-2024, we could see enterprises making larger investments into their data infrastructure, attempting to full-proof their cybersecurity stance with a streamlined API-first approach. As the SaaS sprawl continues to spread, having an API-first development approach could completely revolutionize the way enterprises adopt, use and upgrade their technology stacks. As Cloud Computing and Digital Experience strategies take top spots in the organization’s growth map, we could see further monetization of generative AI and AI-led insights for achieving short and long-term revenue goals.
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