But it is also important to look to the future at the end of the year in order to better prepare for upcoming challenges and opportunities. What is coming in 2023 and how can companies better position themselves? According to Ralf Baumann, Country Manager Germany at Veritas Technologies, the following developments can be expected:

1. cloud budgets are reviewed more closely

According to a recent study by Veritas, 93% of companies spend too much money on the cloud and exceed their budgets by an average of 47%. As the amount of data increases year on year, the cost of cloud storage is also rising. This is becoming increasingly difficult for IT teams to justify. Although most companies have been able to realize advanced business strategies by adopting the cloud, CEOs and board members will demand more transparency regarding the return on investment (ROI) of cloud spending in the future.

Also, because experts are predicting an economic downturn in the coming year, we at Veritas expect IT spending to come under even greater scrutiny in 2023. This means that IT managers will be under great pressure to justify their cloud budgets while finding new solutions to reduce the volume of data. New technologies in particular often enable more effective strategies for data storage and management. This applies, for example, to deduplication solutions that reduce storage consumption.

2. low-code and no-code make compliance with regulations more difficult

Low-code and no-code applications have contributed significantly to the democratization of application development in companies. They will become even more established in 2023. Employees without a technical background (citizen developers) will have the opportunity to develop their own applications. Although this will significantly reduce the workload of IT teams, it will also lead to compliance issues for companies. Because citizen developers have less experience in implementing security and data protection systems, many of the programs they develop may not be adequately protected and compliance guidelines may be applied inaccurately. What's more, this creates new vulnerabilities that can be exploited by cyber criminals.

3. bottlenecks in the supply chain put software providers under pressure

In 2023, software-only providers will continue to bring their solutions to market quickly. However, the lack of availability of hardware is a challenge. Geopolitical restrictions and chip bottlenecks have severely impacted the supply chain for hardware products. The associated delays have made it difficult for customers to implement software and hardware together to create functional solutions. To counter supply chain issues, organizations should leverage more cloud-based solutions and appliances where hardware and software are already bundled, rather than running multiple individual solutions and waiting for the hardware components.

4. cross-cloud data mobility prevails

Most companies currently use several public cloud services. While a multi-cloud strategy offers benefits such as flexibility and agility, interoperability remains a challenge for data managers: Moving data from one cloud to another is not only expensive - it can also create security risks if the clouds don't work together seamlessly, resulting in data silos. To keep up with the pace of cloud offerings, achieve their business cloud goals and improve data portability, companies are increasingly using solutions based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). This enables them to better manage challenges such as siloed workloads and cloud interoperability. As more and more companies gain increasing control in the cloud in this way, cross-cloud data mobility will become more prevalent in 2023.

5. more edge devices mean more vulnerabilities

Gartner analysts predict that by 2025, more than 50 percent of the data managed by companies will be created and processed outside the data center or the cloud. The increasing relocation of data processing at the edge complicates IT architecture and increases the attack surface. Due to the shortage of IT specialists, it is often not possible to provide the same level of protection at the edge of the network as in the data center or the cloud. To fully protect the company, however, every single edge device must be secured. It is also important to determine which edge device data is critical or non-critical. This makes it possible to estimate the storage costs and expenditure for protective measures, which can lead to an additional burden on IT budgets.

6. kubernetes becomes mission-critical

Over the past 24 months, Kubernetes has established itself at many companies. Containers are also increasingly being used in mission-critical environments. This means that such environments and the data on which they are based must also be protected. However, securing containers often leads to silos. In addition, there is increasing confusion as to whether the backup administrator or the DevOps administrator is responsible. At the same time, it is difficult to find out which containers should be backed up and how. Against this backdrop, the need for training in Kubernetes is increasing. In 2023, IT departments will still be grappling with the question of how to adequately protect and back up their Kubernetes environments.