Veritas’ Top 5 Technology Predictions for 2023

By Johnny Karam, Managing Director and Vice President, International Emerging Regions, Veritas Technologies

1. More scrutiny of cloud budgets in 2023

The UAE is a global hub for digital transformation and is leading the way in the global adoption of public cloud. However, as each new solution is introduced into an organization’s technology stack, it adds more complexity and, if not managed properly, costs.

according to Veritas Research, 99% of UAE organizations are overspending on cloud and on average exceed their allotted cloud budget by 45%. As the volume of data grows every year, the cost of storing it in the cloud becomes more and more difficult to justify. While most companies have advanced business strategies through cloud adoption, CEOs and boards of directors will increasingly demand transparency about the ROI of cloud spending.

With many economists predicting a prolonged economic downturn next year, we expect further scrutiny of IT spending in 2023, putting pressure on IT leaders to justify cloud budgets while finding new ways to reduce data volumes. method. This could lead to more efficient data storage and management strategies, such as data deduplication, to ensure reduced storage consumption.

2. Cross-cloud data movement will go mainstream

According to our recent research, UAE businesses currently use an average of three different public cloud providers for their storage needs. While there are myriad benefits of a multi-cloud strategy, such as flexibility and agility, interoperability remains a challenge for data managers—not only is it expensive to move data from one cloud to another, but when the cloud is not seamless When working together independently, this creates silos within the organization and can introduce significant security gaps.

To keep pace with cloud offerings and achieve business-driven cloud goals, enterprises will start leveraging AI/ML and autonomous solutions to help alleviate the challenges of siled workloads and enhance cloud interoperability through data portability. Cross-cloud data movement will become more mainstream in 2023 as organizations grapple with interoperability challenges and gain more control in the cloud.

3. More Edge Devices Means More Vulnerabilities

Knuth predict By 2025, more than 50 percent of enterprise management data will be created and processed outside the data center or cloud. As more data processing moves to the edge, IT architectures become complex and attack surfaces increase. Additionally, due to skills and staffing shortages, enterprises often do not apply the same level of protection to the edge as they do in the data center or cloud. To fully protect the enterprise, each of these edge devices needs to be secured and backed up. Most importantly, organizations need to determine which data from edge devices is critical or non-critical to sustain storage and protection costs and understand the added scrutiny of IT budgets.

4. Kubernetes goes mission critical

Over the past 24 months, Kubernetes has gone mainstream. Containers are now being adopted in mission-critical environments, which means that application environments and underlying data in these environments now need to be protected. More than a third of UAE organizations (32%) have deployed Kubernetes for mission-critical applications, but this is often driven at the project level, with 51% of Kubernetes adoption decisions made without significant input from the CIO or IT leadership team made under the circumstances of the influence.

Now, however, ownership of these containers and securing them has become more complex, creating silos and confusion, not knowing whether the backup admin or the DevOps admin is responsible. At the same time, organizations are struggling to determine which containers to back up and how, which could lead to more investment in training to help close the Kubernetes skills gap. In 2023, IT departments will continue to explore how to adequately secure and back up their Kubernetes environments.

5. Compliance will move higher on government and private sector agendas

As one of several digital initiatives aimed at preparing for the future, the UAE launched its first federal Personal Data Protection (PDP) in early 2022 as a vital reminder of the critical value of data in today’s digital economy – and why need protection.

By 2023, businesses will begin to take compliance more seriously, as a year has passed since the law went into effect. Elements of this will include increasing visibility into company and customer data, ensuring that data processing is lawful, upholding individual privacy rights, and ensuring that data processor and data controller positions are filled to meet UAE compliance requirements.