This past year has brought a great deal of attention to diverse sectors of tech trends ranging from cybersecurity to software development with industry-wide progress, as well as a number of rising threats to users and stakeholders.
The WillDom team values in-depth comprehension of what is taking place in the market to operate and deliver quality year-round. Having kept a close eye on the tech trends of 2022, we found that most of them unfolded just as we predicted!
Now here’s what some of our leaders see for the technology space in 2023:
More Startups Introduce PlanSecOps
The focus on cybersecurity going forward will be essential in the upcoming year for every company. But taking a deeper dive, we see more startups taking on a PlanSecOps approach to their software development.
Providing a holistic, comprehensive approach to managing security operations across an organization, PlanSecOps focuses on creating a secure environment by developing secure policies and procedures, as well as implementing security technologies from the early stages during planning for application development. It also involves monitoring, assessing, and responding to potential threats while ensuring that organizations are prepared for potential risks and can respond quickly and effectively if an incident occurs.
- Andres Perea, Chief Executive Officer, WillDom
The IT Talent Shortage will Accelerate
The trending demand for specialized, highly sought-after tech skills has been on the rise despite economic restraints and layoffs. A growing number of competitors and market saturation also play a major role in this talent shortage we’ll continue to see in 2023.
Taking a look at the cybersecurity sector of IT we have seen that the rise in threats and attacks has been met with short-staffed tech teams. A recent release shared that, “80% of organizations suffered from at least one data breach in the past 12 months due to a lack of cybersecurity talent or awareness”. This workforce gap will require many companies who do not leverage third-party teams like WillDom to overspend on talent acquisition and management since the top companies will be spending millions on budgets and working minutes to form and sustain their talent.
- Andres Perea, Chief Executive Officer, WillDom
AIaaS
Artificial Intelligence-as-a-Service (AIaaS) is relatively new but we see it having a boom in 2023 as more companies see the potential brought by AI to generate efficiency in diverse areas of an organization’s flow. It can be taken on as a relatively low-risk initiative that allows companies to experiment with the technology, and all of it takes place on a network that uses cloud computing to deliver the intelligence to the user. This off-the-shelf AI service typically doesn’t require any form of coding on the user’s end, and when it does, simply applying a no-code infrastructure will do the trick.
One very interesting service that we saw spotlighted in 2022 was ChatGPT, a model that was trained to interact with users in a conversational manner. The AI has a wide range of capabilities ranging from more sophisticated, functional ones such as finding and fixing bugs in source code and turning a JavaScript function into a one-liner to more informal functions like translating difficult text for a “2nd grader” and a factual chatbot that is also sarcastic. This is the kind of technology that can be leveraged by a company to deliver customer-facing solutions like chat box customer service as well as internal tools like data analysis.
- Andres Perea, Chief Executive Officer, WillDom
Remote Work has Arrived, and it is Here to Stay
At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work in the tech sector became a necessity for most companies worldwide. And now over two years later, we see remote work, often combined with hybrid, has become the new norm. Hybrid work seems to be a middle ground between employers and collaborators, where most of the benefits from remote work are implied but there is also room for personal interaction with other human beings in person.
The question is: what is the right balance between remote and on-site work? The answer will depend on the company’s culture, size, and process of working. Recent studies show that collaborators would push for more remote work days when asked, yet a lot of them also feel lonely in their new work environments. One source shared that the average number of days per week in which employees are asked to work from home saw a rise from 1.58 days per week in January 2021 to 2.37 as of June 2022. In another collaborative study carried out by two organizations along with researchers from Boston University and the University of Canterbury, surveys of over 1,000 remote workers from 55 countries indicated that 55% of them feel loneliness in the remote workplace (15% feel this often or all of the time).
So moving forward, companies will have to establish a balance between the welfare of their teams and an ambitious approach to their business goals.
- Javier Ibanez-Padilla, Chief Networking Officer, WillDom
Growing Importance of Cyber, Cyber, Cybersecurity!
Now that remote and hybrid work has gone mainstream, cybersecurity measures have become a top priority in any C-Level list. There’s a significant rise in digital activity and organizations need to scale up their networks and infrastructure to deliver on the changing expectations of internal and external users.
Attacks ranging from phishing on an individual level to company-wide ransomware attacks pose a great risk to all stakeholders who are now taking their work devices outside of the office space. In fact, an IBM study shared that organizations with more than 60% remote teams had a higher average data breach cost than those without remote workers. And the costs of these breaches were calculated by IBM to be an average of $1 million greater than in breaches where remote wasn’t a factor. Most of the organizations were not prepared to manage this and proper adjustments will continue to be made during this upcoming year.
- Javier Ibanez-Padilla, Chief Networking Officer, WillDom
Automation to Reach New Users
AI and automation have the potential to improve our lives in a number of ways when they are combined. Some of the potential benefits include:
- Increased efficiency and productivity – By automating tasks and processes and using AI to analyze data and make decisions, it is possible to reduce the time and resources needed to complete them. This can lead to cost savings and increased competitiveness for businesses, as well as greater output per unit of input for the economy as a whole.
- Improved quality and consistency – Removing the variability that can come with human labor and using AI to analyze and optimize processes, it is possible to produce more consistent and high-quality products and services.
- Social and environmental benefits – AI and automation can help to reduce unemployment and increase the availability of jobs that require higher levels of skill and education as well as reduce the environmental impact of industries by decreasing the consumption of resources and reducing waste and emissions.
Overall, the automation brought by growing artificial intelligence has the potential to bring about numerous benefits in a variety of industries and aspects of our lives. While it is important to ensure the responsible and ethical use of AI and automation, the benefits of these technologies can be significant.
- Martin Suarez-Viacava, Chief Revenue Officer, WillDom
As these trends take shape in the year ahead of us, we look to follow their progress and keep an eye out for many new technologies that will surely take the industry by storm. Stay up to date year-round as we cover new trends and opportunities on our LinkedIn and visit us at WillDom.com for more on what we do.
