With 2023 right around the corner, it’s a good time to spend a minute thinking about how the world of NetOps will likely change over the coming year as we continue global reconfigurations due to health and safety, political, and socio-economic pressures. No one would disagreed that the last year has proven to be one of tremendous uncertainty and progressive recovery, with so many of the world’s ‘new norms’ still being investigated, designed and embraced. And while the pandemic has changed the world forever, the role of IT in business has never been more essential. Sure, new styles of computing continue to present themselves, but NetOps itself is changing for a long list of reasons…. not just due to hardware and software.
So here it is:
(in no particular order)
1. Cloud migration will account for an additional 5% of total computing for the year. Not surprising as the requirements of IT infrastructures continue to become more complex and the specific skilled and experienced NetOps staffing becomes more difficult to find, so IT infrastructure will be moved to the cloud more quickly. For 2023, I would expect to see 5% of all workloads currently being handled by traditional topologies (housed in data centers or co-location sites) will be virtualized and migrated into the cloud. This is a huge increase over 2022, and according to Gartner, represents a 20% increase in cloud provider revenues, up from $490B in 2022 to $591B in 2023. Enterprise NetOps leaders will be expected to design service delivery plans with a keen focus on Cloud services, including the visibility and supportability expected in traditional infrastructures.
2. Service Delivery Accountability will be revisited and renewed as topologies become more virtual. One of the lessons learned over the past half dozen years is that the IT leadership of any organization continues to be responsible for IT… regardless of where the work has been hosted. Previously it was acceptable to point the finger at the cloud providers or MSPs as the source of any issues since that is who owned the computing power platforms. In 2023 it will become quite UNACCEPTABLE to point the finger anywhere else when it comes to IT service delivery performance. Classical wisdom will be re-stated that IT leadership CHOOSES where to put services, but the responsibility for the services themselves ALWAYS stays with IT leadership. In 2023, the interest in multi-vendor and hybrid “End-to-End” visibility, control and supportability will be renewed.
3. Subject-Matter-Experts will become fewer in number and more expensive to hire. The Pandemic has changed how people look at their individual roles, and how their personal work-life balance plays out. In 2023, the ‘great attrition’ will continue to manifest itself, further reducing the number of skilled NetOps professionals available across the industry. The skilled workers that remain will prefer to stay at their current employers (due to the looming recession) but will also command a higher compensation package which IT leaders will be obliged to pay to retain their services. In 2023, the means to capture SME expertise and make it sharable will be sought and an organization’s stored knowledge base will begin to grow.
4. Outages and Service Degradation will be more frequent in 2023. Perhaps counter-intuitive to some people, but the IT industry as a whole is getting worse at keeping IT running over time. Study after study confirms that the frequency of outages and service degradations is increasing, the duration of each of those incidents is elongating, and the fiscal impact of these problems is rising. This is largely due to the fact that while infrastructure hardware and software technologies have markedly advanced servers, storage, and networks, the manner in which these leading-edge technologies are managed has largely remained unchanged for decades. Literally, 30 years ago network engineers were hacking through the same kind of command lines and individual scripting to solve remediation challenges. And one of the results is they are solving the same problem over and over again as if it were bespoke. In 2023, the most successful CIOs will focus on recreating the IT function with a blank canvas, thinking differently about service delivery, and then capturing expertise and then automating that expertise at scale.
5. Network Security challenges will force a broader understanding of the problem itself and why all of the investment in security solutions STILL yields a ton of front-page attacks. In 2022, it was reported by a University of Minnesota researcher that a severe security incident occurred globally once every 39 minutes. For 2023, the adoption of virtualized infrastructure and the M&A activities brought about by economic stress will create larger attack surfaces with bigger rewards for successful hacks. Breaches will increase proportionally to the adoption of cloud services unless more proactive policies and procedures are put into place that continuously validates or ‘tests’ the function of each security solution in place. In 2023, the most aggressive Enterprises will institute the verification/validation of their investments in security hardware and software, essentially making sure each part is always doing the job it was designed to do. They will continuously test and retest the boundary conditions that their security architects have defined.
6. Mean-Time-To-Repair (MTTR) will rise as infrastructure complexity increases and staffing resources and specific experience decreases. One of the less-known facts about running a digital infrastructure is the volume of network service desk tickets. In large multi-national organizations, these service desks may be barraged by HUNDREDS of service tickets EACH DAY. While the average MTTR for these tickets has historically been several hours, the number of tickets will continue to rise in 2023 due to complexity and dispersion, and the duration for each ticket will increase as the required skill-sets staffing becomes more scarce or more highly utilized. Historically, enterprises rarely created repeatable remediation processes, instead treating network incident remediation as more of an one-off scenerio, and due to the differences in skill sets, the work performed has always been more of an ART than a SCIENCE. Enterprises that invest in the means to capture expertise and make it scalable/sharable will be well positioned as 2023 unfolds.
7. Tactical versus Strategic will become a big theme for IT leaders in 2023. While these leaders have always considered themselves strategic change agents, their ability over the last handful of years to devote the majority of their time to strategic activities has been limited due to the scope and scale of their immediate tactics. In general, IT infrastructures are living growing beasts and most NetOps teams are happy to just make it through each day unscathed. There is simply too much fire-fighting at play within infrastructures that are fairly delicate in nature. Not surprising because most of these infrastructures are poorly understood at the detail level, poorly documented, and the interdependencies poorly understood. In 2023, their shareholders, stakeholders and the Analyst community will continue to challenge IT leaders to carve out the time needed to plan ahead strategically and get past their daily fire-fighting. Analysts have been recommending this for years, but nearly all board meetings and advisory meetings in 2023 will identify strategic thinking about the digital infrastructure as a critical success factor for EVERY organization.
8. Hybrid Cloud, End-to-End Visibility will reign king in 2023. IT leaders will begin asking (more vocally) for core foundational infrastructure knowledge; assessments of what is connected to what, what are the apps in place and how are they architected, what are the service-level and performance interdependencies, what are the support plans and resources, etc. And they will no longer accept the artificial boundaries and silos that have become so commonplace within IT. Technologies such as SDN and SD-WAN will not be allowed to sit on the periphery any longer. NetOps challenges are far-reaching and usually traverse distance and function. In 2023 a much more homogenous operational top-down and business-centric view will be required, viewing topologies from many angles; raw connectivity, performance capacity, and even security conditions.
9. AIOps has long been a promise but the value will continue to be elusive. While a huge number of startups have come and gone trying to automatically deliver elastic or autonomic computing, the goal of AIOps continues to be misdirected. In fact, if you were to ask any NetOps leader about their ability to solve problems within their infrastructure, they would say that they have a handful of ‘really smart subject matter experts that can fix any problem’. They would then go on to tell you that they wish they could clone those infrastructure heroes. So what they are acknowledging is the challenge for 2023 and beyond is not one of SCOPE, it is one of SCALE. In 2023 new initiatives will be funded to identify and deploy solutions that can capture existing knowledge and allow it to be repeated at scaled over time and distance.
10. No-code continues to rise in popularity and in 2023 will advance even faster. ISG recently stated that the market for No-Code in 2022 is approximately $25B and rising to over $45B over the next 4 years. What is it about No-Code that is so attractive? It is the ability of ANYONE that solves problems to capture their experience in a bottle and share it with colleagues. Historically NetOps work needed to be executed manually based on personal experience, or codified by teams of programmers into functional specifications and rigid use-case-based applications. The problem is functional specifications take enormous commitments in resources to create, the development is costly and takes forever to deliver, and the results are usually underwhelming since new requirements previously not addressed arise daily. In 2023, we will see the reliance on subject-matter experts capturing their experience using No-Code approaches, and this knowledge will be stored and shared globally, effectively empowering every operator and engineer with the collective knowledge of their peers.
The most important advice for all IT leaders in 2023 is to grab an oar and pull. Time is moving forward and businesses that can look forward are becoming stronger. Rather than preserving the NetOps processes that have been in place for decades, take a deep breath and look for smarter ways to solve problems. Now is the time to embrace our new reality and optimize it given the new set of circumstances we have, rather than continue to wait for the ‘good ole days to return… which thanks to the pandemic and widescale socio-economic pressures will never happen!