Despite a looming recession, the C-suite remain committed to digital transformation. A recent Gartner forecast predicts worldwide IT spending to reach USD4.6 trillion in 2023, an increase of 5.1 percent from 2022. Though this represents a significant uptick, business decision-makers must weigh their options, especially when it comes to data analytics and business intelligence tools, to optimize returns on investment.
As we head into 2023, Fivetran, as a leader of automated data integration, predicts the following trends to be influential for data teams all over the world.
2023 will be data teams’ time to shine
Companies have maintained investment in IT despite wide variance in the quality of returns. With widespread confusion in the economy, it is time for data teams to shine by providing actionable insight because executive intuition is less reliable when markets are in flux. The best data teams will grow in importance.
With economic uncertainty, we will see companies taking a deeper look at cloud data warehouse costs and become much more serious about cost control. Information on total cost of ownership is critical to effectively managing costs for data teams because driving down costs one at a time will undermine the efficacy of the whole system. On the one hand, this will put data teams at risk of budgetary pressure but could also be an opportunity to demonstrate efficiency with total cost of ownership and data insights that unlock business value.
Data security will remain the C-suite’s top priority in 2023
Data security and access to data will be major topics of concern for C-suites in 2023. Governance is going to address the challenges. Good data governance enables the citizen analyst, driving efficiencies for data teams. Integration between various vendors will become mainstream, and it will drive investment.
We will also see more collaboration between cloud security and application security teams. This is a result of an increasing number of companies becoming cloud native. Vulnerability and risk management, code scanning, threat modeling, and secure development processes can benefit from a shared approach as we see more appsec professionals taking cloud infrastructure into account in their work, and more of their cloudsec counterparts taking traditional appsec practices to heart.
A thrust on trust in Data with Observability
Organizations want to be smarter with the data in their modern data stacks. But can it be trusted? Is it accurate and reliable? Is the data up to date? Observability will be an important trend in 2023. By gaining trust in the data, new projects will be unlocked. With solid observability in place, organizations have fewer regulatory hoops to jump through, driving efficiencies and cost savings.
Data streaming to join a modern and standardized data stack
Companies will be looking to standardize their data stack at an increasing rate in 2023 because of too many tools being used across the company. Further, it’s crucial they make decisions based on the right data – especially with things like revenue and operational expenses being under an increasingly critical eye. Data trust and visibility will be more important than ever due to these factors.
Data streaming will find its place in the modern data stack. Like machine learning – or rather, in conjunction with machine learning – it is driving new use cases. Streaming data has also reached critical mass, but is nowhere near the point of saturation. Organizations will invest, be it at a slower pace, in streaming technologies in 2023.
In 2023, big tech will continue to be regulators’ favorite targets
Anti-trust and privacy enforcement against big tech is just getting started, and developments in the EU will start to make a bigger impact next year, reducing big tech’s control over content in particular. If we think we’ve grown accustomed to seeing big tech as frequently targeted, we haven’t seen anything yet.
A new age of privacy reform is coming. Historically, many countries have copied GDPR since it took effect, but now we’re seeing countries move in different directions. Heralding a pivot in privacy legislation to one focused on taking the ‘best’ parts of GDPR, but shedding other provisions in favour of pragmatism. Potentially, this could result in more reasonable burdens on organizations that protect individual privacy, rather than placing the onus on consumers to exercise their privacy rights.
India is also moving in the same direction. The recently released draft ‘Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2022’ recognizes personal data protection as a right, emphasizing the need to process personal data for lawful purposes. The bill imposes penalties going as high as 2.5 billion rupees (USD30 million) for non-compliance.
