If there's a word to aptly describe 2023: acceleration. Technology, hype cycles, climate change — they all seem to be gathering speed as we head into 2024. AI moved from the margins to a can't-live-without, mainstream technology in a flash. A tropical depression in Mexico unexpectedly escalated into a Category 5 hurricane in just a few hours. One tour turned Taylor Swift from a chart-topping pop singer into a GDP-impacting uber-celebrity.
Whatever line of business you're in, now is the time of year to take your foot off the accelerator and survey the landscape for the trends and throughlines that deserve your attention in 2024 for the impact they're likely to have on your organization, its customers and workforce, and more broadly, on the industry and markets in which your organization is active. Here are several that I believe warrant the attention of business decision-makers in 2024:
1. AI triggers a digital reality check.
Beyond the hype, artificial intelligence (AI) is proving its value as a tool for improving customer journeys, automating business processes and making better, timelier tactical and strategic decisions. However, organizations are realizing that to maximize AI's value, they first must shore up their digital foundation.
As highly context-specific as generative AI (genAI) is, harnessing its power in real-life business use cases requires a mastery over organizational and supply chain data — because fresh, reliable and relevant data is critical to training the models that power genAI.
You also need a solid, seamless digital infrastructure to support AI, one built on a modern cloud computing architecture capable of handling a huge volume of data, as well as a scalable, secure and powerful enterprise-wide network that's connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) data-gathering points to feed the AI models and help them learn.
To maximize the value of AI, organizations that rely heavily on disparate, disconnected legacy IT and networking systems will likely need to take a hard look at shifting away from those systems to a fully integrated digital infrastructure.
2. Extreme weather puts a premium on business continuity planning.
I expect this to be true even for organizations in areas that historically haven't been disaster-prone. As of November, the United States had been hit with a record 25 disasters that caused at least $1 billion in damage, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
This is the climate reality we live in, and businesses — including those that operate outside traditionally disaster-prone areas — have to plan for the unprecedented, particularly given the stakes. The ITIC found that the cost of a single hour of unplanned network downtime could cost an enterprise $300,000 or more.
Whatever the size of your business, 24/7/365 network connectivity and uptime is a must. Without it, an organization can become practically invisible to the outside world and see employee productivity plummet. So, it's critical that they have a detailed, up-to-date business continuity plan that contemplates all the what-ifs, from hurricanes to political and economic uncertainty tied to the 2024 elections and yes, even a clumsy coffee catastrophe in the server room. I wrote about disaster preparedness and business continuity planning in more detail here.
3. More organizations see the wisdom in outsourcing IT infrastructure and management.
Moving to a multi-cloud/hybrid cloud environment confronts organizations with new complexities that must be managed. For reasons of cost, flexibility, performance and customization in the context of an organization's cloud migration strategy, there's a strong case to be made for using cloud services from multiple providers or a mix of cloud and on-premises infrastructure.
A 2023 report from Expel and the Cloud Security Alliance found that 71% of surveyed organizations are using a multi-cloud environment "mainly to leverage the strengths of different providers, improve performance and latency, enhance resilience and disaster recovery, and reduce vendor lock-in." However, doing so brings with it new complexities and new risks, as the report notes. "Respondents said their organizations have difficulty managing costs and resource allocation in multi-cloud environments, and struggle to integrate or orchestrate multiple cloud service providers."
Rather than asking their internal teams to manage these sophisticated cloud environments themselves, some organizations are choosing to shift those responsibilities to a third-party expert in order to effectuate, operate and optimize their hybrid cloud or multi-cloud investments.
4. New cybersecurity threats prompt a rush to sophisticated, unified security strategies.
Multi-extortion ransomware attacks. Third-party associate attacks. Initial access brokers exposing cyber vulnerabilities in organizations, then selling those "leads" to any bad actor willing to meet their price. These are among the many emerging threats that organizations must defend themselves against. And their best chance of protecting themselves is to counter the persistence and sophistication of today's cyberattackers with persistence and sophistication of their own, via a new breed of solutions that integrate multiple cybersecurity capabilities.
Globally, the average cost of a data breach has risen 15% over three years, to $4.45 million per incident in 2023, according to an IBM's 2023 data breach report. Security Service Edge (SSE) and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) are among the most advanced security solutions that combine multiple security layers into a single, cloud-native software stack, creating a global fabric of enterprise-level security that protects all of an enterprise's potentially vulnerable surfaces out to the network edges, even as those edges shift.
By 2025, Gartner expects that 80% of enterprises will adopt a strategy to unify web, cloud services and private application access from a single vendor's SSE platform. By then, as fast as our world moves, what new types of cyber threats will organizations need to protect against?
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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