Matt Hurford predicts the following.

Addressing the ICT skills gap

While the Federal Government and the local tech sector have a shared commitment to achieving 1.2 million tech jobs in Australia by 2030, the skills gap among ICT talent is expected to intensify over the coming year.

The shortage of technical talents can undermine the adoption of emerging, cloud-based technologies. Managing multiple clouds and on-premises environments together can be tricky and inefficient. As businesses continue to prioritise digital transformation and hybrid multi-cloud adoption picks up, IT leaders will need to ensure their teams are sufficiently upskilled to narrow to the gap.

Going into 2023, we expect more organisations to leverage AIOps to simplify and standardise their operations, reducing their need for workload-specific skills. Solutions that integrate data and cloud infrastructure under a unified controlled pane will empower ICT talents with generalist skillsets to perform specialised tasks, and mitigate the impact of the critical skills gap.

Delivering a better hybrid multi-cloud experience for enterprises

Organisations have increasingly moved to hybrid, multi-cloud environments to accelerate their digital transformation and drive growth, even in uncertain times. Already, 84 per cent of APAC enterprises (ref. 1 below)have adopted a multi-cloud approach. However, many enterprises realised their cloud is not living up to its full potential due to complexity; siloed, disparate environments; security risks; and rising costs.

Public cloud spending in APAC is expected to continue its rise by 28 per cent YoY (ref. 2 below) in 2023. In NSW, the state government expects all its agencies to be using the public cloud for a minimum of 25 per cent of their ICT services by the end of this year.

While this continued migration to the cloud is not surprising, sustained supply chain challenges are pushing buyers to look beyond on-prem hardware to ease procurement challenges. Moving forward, more organisations will take a strategic approach that seamlessly connects a mix of cloud and on-prem environments. 

In the next phase of the evolved cloud, enterprises will turn to a unified control plane to remove management complexity, stay secure against evolving cyber threats, be sustainable, and cut costs through automation, whether their data resides on the cloud or on-prem. This will put organisations in a position to focus on innovation and drive their business.

Achieving true sustainability

Eighty per cent of Australian organisations recognise that technological innovation has a key role to play in improving environmental sustainability (ref. 3 below). In order to reach their net-zero targets, IT vendors will need to work towards creating greener value chains and showcase solutions that can drive sustainable outcomes for both customers and partners. When we consider the massive carbon footprint of global data storage, of which only 32 per cent of all data created is ever used (ref. 4 below), efficient management must be top of mind.

At NetApp, we are helping our customers minimise their environmental footprint by moving on-prem storage to greener public clouds. We also have industry-leading tools to audit consumption, locate waste, and automatically set guardrails to stop overprovisioning through a single control pane. This reduces carbon emissions and saves operational costs.

Pre-empting quantum hybrid computing’s impact on cybersecurity

While quantum hybrid computing is still some time away from mass adoption, it is emerging as a very real threat to cybersecurity. If Australia is to become “the most cyber-secure country in the world by 2030”, as quoted recently by Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security Claire O’Neil, companies need to think about data protection now more than ever. Bad actors are increasingly sophisticated, and companies need to be equally sophisticated when it comes to their security measures.

The industry is already exploring how quantum hybrid models can help protect sensitive data more effectively and drive the development of new encryption protocols and algorithms. It is encouraging to see such forward-thinking, and stakeholders exploring a cloud-based approach to solve security issues that once seemed unsolvable.

When it comes to cloud technology, we know the only constant is change. Companies must be forward-thinking about how and where they manage their data, security, and their hybrid, multicloud infrastructures. We can’t keep the next local, national, or global crisis from happening, but with a strong cloud strategy, the impact can be mitigated. 

References

1 State of Cloud Strategy Survey, Forrester and HashiCorp, 2022.

2 Asia/Pacific* Public Cloud Services to Reach US$165.2 Billion in 2026, according to IDC Forecast, IDC, 2022.

3 Accelerating the journey to net zero, Microsoft, 2022.

4 Rethink Data Report, IDC and Seagate, 2020.