As we step into 2024, the technological landscape is undergoing a profound transformation, underscored by escalating cyber threats and a rapid shift towards advanced cloud and AI technologies. Key industry leaders from Kyndryl Australia and New Zealand, including Sandeep Parande, Michael Vincetic, and Justin Ciabotti, share their insights on these emerging trends. Parande highlights the urgent need for enhanced cybersecurity measures like quantum encryption and AI-driven threat detection, emphasizing the importance of cyber resilience. Vincetic discusses the evolving cloud landscape, with a focus on data centre optimisation and the increasing influence of hybrid cloud models. Ciabotti predicts a significant surge in the use of generative AI, underscoring the necessity of robust data strategies to fuel AI advancements. Collectively, these perspectives paint a picture of a year marked by technological advancements, heightened security measures, and an ever-growing reliance on AI and cloud technologies.
Sandeep Parande, Resiliency Practice Leader, Kyndryl Australia and New Zealand
“But while you can increase your defence with best of the solutions in the market, they are no good unless you have constant vigilance to detect cyber incidents. You cannot have an effective defence if you are not consistently keeping up to date on how cyber threats are morphing: in 2024 that will include more AI and machine-learning enabled cyberattacks, which means we will see more use of AI-driven automated threat detection.
“We will also see a big push for cyber education to be rolled out more deeply across all functions of an organisation. An employee does not need to have intrusive credentials or super admin credentials to be a target for hackers: they may in fact be the low hanging fruit that gets hackers into the system.
It will be incumbent on organisations to empower their people with the knowledge and capabilities required to know how to spot unusual or suspicious activity, and to raise the alert. “Ultimately, the most significant development for me in 2024 will be organisations recognising – and acting upon – their need to develop greater “cyber resilience” so they are ready not only to anticipate, protect and detect cyber threats but to recover when the gates are breached.
Increasingly, organisations will run regular tabletop exercises with more employees involved so that when a cyber incident inevitably happens, muscle memory kicks in, calm heads prevail and the organisation recovers quickly and efficiently with minimal damage.”
“2024 marks an inflection point for the C-suite when it comes to cloud. Many enterprises have already moved up to half their workloads to public cloud.
In turn, IT leaders are either asking themselves “how do I optimise my investment and/or realise full value from my cloud investment?” or are focused on what to do with the residual, unused technology and technical debt that is left over.
“Almost all enterprises have already moved the ‘less complex workloads’ to public cloud through treatments like ‘lift and shift’ and rehosting, so in 2024 we will see a renewed focus on data centre optimisation as organisations try to realise cloud-like features within their data centres without having to move their more complex, mission critical assets.
“Meanwhile, 5G is enabling computing to stay closer to the edge, which has led hyperscalers to extend their services to exist right within the data centre. All of that means hybrid/distributed cloud is now becoming the norm, and in 2024 we’ll see a far more balanced view of cloud usage rather than quickly moving everything to the public cloud.
“In 2024 we will see a continued shift towards multiple stakeholders influencing technology buying decisions. What was predominantly the domain of the CIO now includes other key parties, such as CFOs, who are asking important questions about realising the full value of cloud.
CFOs naturally focus on ROI, but we will also see even greater focus on ESG metrics with investment decisions impacted by environmental concerns such as the level of CO2 emissions generated from cloud migrations.
“Finally, businesses will focus more on managing service levels to elevate customer experiences, by using automation and AI IT operations (AIOps) to reduce manual processes, improve the developer experience and create a seamless experience and unified observability for the end user.”
“As widely expected, I anticipate significant growth in the use of generative AI amongst enterprises in 2024. Whilst generative AI is in the news and on the top of everyone’s mind, only a very small percentage of enterprises currently use it productively.
We expect that to drastically change in 2024 and have prepared ourselves by expanding our partnerships with both Microsoft and AWS to bring generative AI to the enterprises.
“AI is as good as the data you have available for it, so we also anticipate seeing further growth in customers investing to prepare their data strategy and foundations in 2024. This includes building more robust and modern data fabrics to have all the right data available for generative AI and large language models.
“Finally, I expect to see more application modernisation and migration amongst mature enterprises with legacy infrastructure estates, particularly in industries such as banking, finance, and the public sector. Many have moved the easier workloads and applications to cloud but many of these legacy estates are still running business-critical applications that need modernisation before moving to the cloud and leveraging cloud native technologies.”
