NITCH 2023 PREVIEW
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Alex Tatham , global head of clients and marketing, NSC Global
Hope is not a strategy – NSC Global are planning for and expecting considerable growth in 2023. This will come from more services and increased focus on hardware sales. In terms of trends for the year ahead, we are already seeing large SI’s and telcos with hiring freezes or worse shedding staff. End users will need IT services and as a privately owned, agile business NSC are well set to take on more staff and outsource commodity services on their behalf. In addition, the shortage of enterprise networking products and budgets will lead many end users to pay for maintenance services on one of their most important assets. Our customers are increasingly demanding equipment as a service reducing initial cash outflows and even the expense line in their budgets. Networking demand will continue to increase as products remain in very short supply. The move to the cloud will continue apace, although many customers are surprised by the cost and are moving to a hybrid position. IT will continue to buck
any recessionary trends as companies continue to invest in efficiencies that technology creates. But while recession may have a positive impact on NSC as companies shed staff and outsource commodity work, the overall channel won’t fare quite as well. Government spending will be curtailed in most countries; consumer demand will continue to decrease as people prioritise more essential spending and products that are in high demand won’t be freely available in 2023 or even 2024. That said, there are two types of forecasters in the world: those that don’t know and those that don’t know they don’t know! I think we enter a tough year ahead for business in general with post- pandemic debt, inflation and war driving recessions across the world. IT will do better as companies invest in efficiencies as opposed to people and there are plenty of IT projects in the pipeline. Focus on cost reduction as this will resonate more and more with buyers and leave nice-to-have innovation firmly at the door.
Alex Tatham NSC Global
nscglobal.com
Paul Speciale , chief marketing officer, Scality Data security considerations have always been at the top of mind for our customers, but in 2023, IT leaders will evaluate every solution, including data storage, by its ability to protect data from the multiplicity of threat vectors. In 2022, the data storage industry evolved to embrace advances in artificial intelligence/ machine learning (AI/ML), hybrid clouds and edge computing that enabled greater data sovereignty and flexibility. In 2023, the pace will accelerate so IT teams will obtain long-promised features that deliver a significant uptick in efficiency.
step in the right direction by introducing a myriad of search tools and services. But there remains an unmet need for intelligence that allows the all- important “aha!” moment to arrive far faster. We predict that in 2023 search and query capabilities for unstructured data storage solutions will mature, and vendors will integrate them with standard access methods, while still guaranteeing enterprise-class security and auditing. This will prove doubly advantageous in simplifying application development and allowing object storage resources to serve as the single solution for unstructured data storage and query. Another trend we foresee is for malicious software supply chain attacks to slow open-source adoption. Malware and ransomware attacks have ballooned such that intrusions now occur every few minutes across the globe. Open-source software dependencies will become an increasing threat vector, causing enterprises to more carefully evaluate and vet these technologies before employing them at scale. There will also be innovation, with green storage rising in importance. We are experiencing a convergence of increased awareness on climate change and an extended economic downturn. These forces will cause enterprises to refocus their IT budgets on solutions that can deliver savings and ROI in operational costs through reduced power consumption.
Paul Speciale Scality
For instance, security will dominate IT buying criteria, including for data storage. Supply chain issues and economic challenges will continue to impact storage projects in 2023, the exception being those that can show tangible ROI on ransomware protection initiatives. This will present an opportunity for big data storage solutions with the intelligence to address current gaps in multi-level security, detection and data immutability for ransomware protection and fast business recoverability. Moreover, solutions that can provide AI-based anomaly-detection capabilities for detecting ransomware attacks will become more mainstream soon. Elsewhere, customers need intelligent data search methods to optimise data analytics and mining of the trillions of unstructured data objects they have aggregated in object storage solutions. In 2022, cloud vendors such as Amazon made a
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