Alongside the evolution of technology, Cisco has highlighted top trends for the upcoming year that will shape business innovation. Key themes include sustainability, efficiency and resilience.
In 2023, the economic climate will continue to be shaped by reducing costs and increasing efficiency. Many companies are therefore looking to the future for innovative technologies that can help here. Here, Cisco outlines the seven technology trends for 2023 in the areas of security, increasing network efficiency, sustainability and AI.
Reem Asaad, Vice President, Cisco Middle East and Africa, said: “The dominant theme throughout these trends is the pace of technological evolution that is continuing to accelerate. These technology trends are on the rise in our region and are shaping the future of every business across all industries, driven by ambitious national visions that are putting technology at the heart of government initiatives in the Middle East and Africa. We are at the intersection of the vast potential such technologies hold, and the challenges that should be mitigated through robust security measures.
“One of the key highlights we’re witnessing more than ever is that businesses need to consider the social context of their actions. Increasingly, we see a focus on environmental, social and governance (ESG) in the region. Whilst we realise that achieving sustainability is complex and multifaceted, what’s certain is that technology continues to play a pivotal role in driving ESG agendas for governments and enterprises,” Asaad added.
Sustainability and AI
- Sustainability – Net Zero will drive common standards to meet sustainability goals with advancements in Power Over Ethernet (PoE) design and hardware to transform data centres for a more sustainable future. Networking and APIs will become more advanced within data centre platform management to monitor, track and change the use of energy. IT vendors and equipment partners will be more transparent in their reuse of hardware (circularity) to move the needle with the sustainability processes
- Responsible AI – In 2023, we will see multiple, highly publicised instances of Artificial Intelligence used by some individuals and organisations to achieve unethical and socially destructive objectives. Industry, governments, academia and NGOs will come together to begin hammering out a framework for governing AI in an ethical and responsible manner to mitigate potential harm. This framework will be based on principles such as transparency, fairness, accountability, privacy, security and reliability and will ultimately be applied to model creation and the selection of training data as defining principles of AI systems
IT security trends
- Quantum cryptography – Transmitting keys is a fundamental risk to security, as they can be harvested and decrypted later. Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is poised to be particularly impactful because it avoids any distribution of the keys over an insecure channel. In 2023, in preparation for a post-quantum world, we will see a macro trend emerge with the adoption of QKD in data centres, IoT, autonomous systems and 6G
- Application and API security – As modern cloud-native applications are becoming drivers of business, protecting the underlying application environment is critical. In 2023, developers will get more and more support from various development tools that speed up development cycles and allow them to manage and secure distributed application architectures with an emphasis on delivering exceptional, secure digital experiences. We will also see continued movement toward tools that allow security experts to collaborate seamlessly on these outcomes
Business efficiency and resilience
- Optimising multi-cloud architectures – As deglobalisation and issues around data sovereignty accelerate, in the year ahead we will see a noticeable shift in how companies leverage multi-cloud architectures. While 89% of enterprises are adopting a multi-cloud strategy for a variety of reasons (geopolitical, technical, provider diversification), the benefits come with additional complexity in connecting, securing and observing a multi-cloud environment. We will see a big move toward new multi-cloud frameworks such as sovereign clouds, local zone clouds, zero-carbon clouds and other novel cloud offerings. This will create a path toward more private and Edge cloud applications and services ushering in a new multi-cloud operating model
- Full-stack observability tied to business outcomes – The problem with monitoring has always been too much data with too little context and business correlation. The evolution of application monitoring toward full-stack observability will increasingly provide a view relative to business context. When applied systematically, this will drastically speed up response and optimise business operations in real-time. In 2023, business context will become widely recognised as an integral part of monitoring and visibility outcomes
- Internet of Things (IoT) makes supply chains more resilient – Enterprises and logistics providers will increasingly utilise IoT to bring full visibility into their supply chains in 2023. IoT and other technologies will not only play a larger role in bringing resiliency and efficiency into supply chains but will also improve cybersecurity and IT/OT network management. As a result, enterprises and logistics providers will reconfigure supply chains around predictive and prescriptive models including smart contracts and distributed ledgers. This is a major transition toward more sustainable business practices and circular supply chains
