Six Trends in Building Resilience and Cutting Costs for 2023

As businesses continue to face new challenges in technology and innovation, building resilience and cutting costs are becoming top priorities for companies of all sizes. From new technologies to conceptual shifts, 2023 is seeing major changes in the way organizations operate.

Cost cutting is one of the top trends on leaders’ minds. Businesses are facing increased pressure to cut costs from their operating budgets as they navigate a challenging economic landscape. With the impact of the pandemic still being felt, the threat of a recession looming, and the cost of goods and services rising, companies are seeking ways to reduce their expenses and remain competitive.

Strengthening resilience is another major change on the horizon, both for a company’s sensitive data and for its entire span of operations. Companies are investing in new technologies and strategies to protect their sensitive data and build a robust cybersecurity infrastructure, reducing their risk of a breach in the face of threats, outages, and attacks.

Below, we’ll explore the major trends in these areas for 2023.

Six trends in building resilience and cutting costs

1. Attacks: not “if” but “when”

Cyberattacks have become more and more common. From phishing and supply chain attacks to malware and RaaS, attempts by cybercriminals are more numerous and more sophisticated than ever. Digital crime is predicted to inflict global damages totaling $8 trillion by the end of the year and $10.5 trillion annually by 2025.

As attacks proliferate, many organizations have shifted their focus from securing everything to preparing for the inevitable. Rather than addressing threats and vulnerabilities after they occur in an elaborate game of catch-up, they are instead building holistic systems that are more resilient to likely attacks and outages. This change in mindset includes focusing much more on data resilience and disaster recovery in order to maintain business operations during and after an attack.

2. Cloud optimization and cost savings

By now, many organizations have migrated to the cloud, and an increasing number of applications and technologies are cloud-native. The natural next step is cutting costs while managing complexity in a multi-cloud environment. Teams are now looking for cloud optimization solutions that involve fewer management burdens and lower costs.

As a Harvard Business Review article put it, “Leaders will have to search for ways to do more with less, find value where innovations overlap, and strategically invest in technologies that are hitting a tipping point.”

Some companies are turning to FinOps, a data-driven approach to cloud cost management. Others are using AI to flag cost spikes for rapid response and to predict future cloud costs. Still others are switching to cheaper storage tiers.

However, many organizations are stuck with legacy applications and more expensive storage than they’d like. ShardSecure’s cloud optimization solution brief explains how our technology helps companies leverage the lower costs of AWS S3 object storage without redesigning applications or workflows.

3. Cybersecurity exercises

Another trend for 2023 is the growing popularity of cybersecurity awareness training for employees, C-suite executives, and even board members. Specifically, companies are using cybersecurity exercises (CSx) to rehearse the processes and chains of command for cyber incident management, response, and recovery.

CSx can help to raise organizational awareness, test capabilities, understand shortcomings, and provide muscle memory in responding and adapting to attacks. Exercises are often designed with gamification features and a scoring system to increase engagement and organizational buy-in.

4. Data resilience and security for machine learning

Automation, AI, and machine learning (ML) are booming, with companies beginning to take advantage of these developing technologies to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and streamline processes in 2023. Thanks to recent advancements in AI and machine learning, businesses can automate everything from data management and analysis to customer service and sales.

But these advances bring the need for improved data protection. AI models rely on carefully prepared datasets to teach machine learning algorithms how to make accurate predictions. Unsurprisingly, these ML datasets have become highly valuable assets for companies. Strong data security and resilience are necessary to protect them from unauthorized access, tampering, and deletion.

5. PaaS and increased cloud spending

Yes, you read that correctly. Although companies will be looking to cut costs for their individual cloud services to combat the rising prices of 2022, overall cloud expenditures are still projected to increase for 2023. Gartner forecasts that worldwide public cloud spending will grow 20.7% to total $591.8 billion in 2023, up from $490.3 billion in 2022.

Why the rise in spending? As long as companies are locking in the lowest possible prices, the cloud is still generally cheaper than on-prem storage. Many organizations are also being more strategic about their digital transformation initiatives. Companies are turning to Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings that provide vital cloud infrastructure and services, reduce development time, and still allow for flexibility.

6. The human factor

Trends in strengthening data resilience and security often focus on technological safeguards like zero trust, MFA, least-privilege access, and biometric authentication — and with good reason. But humans still remain the biggest threat to data security and resilience. As a 2022 Verizon study revealed, “the human factor was the culprit behind 82% of breaches.”

We explain in our December 2022 blog post how 65% of cloud network security breaches in 2021 and 45% of ransomware incidents in 2020 can be attributed to user errors — and what can be done about it.

For 2023, any conversation about data resilience should address not only the technologies and services that look good on paper but also the human element. Smart companies will be seeking ways to improve data resilience that don’t complicate workflows, require significant retraining, or set themselves up for costly mistakes.

ShardSecure: cost-effective, flexible data resilience

Companies are looking to shrink their budgets and reduce complexity in 2023 — but not at the expense of strong data security and resilience. Our plug-and-play technology provides a solution.

ShardSecure keeps data available, accurate, and under your control in on-prem, cloud, and hybrid architectures. We help maintain high availability at multiple levels with our virtual clusters, even in the face of outages and ransomware attacks. We also maintain strong data integrity, an essential component of resilience, and reconstruct compromised data in real-time with our self-healing data.

The ShardSecure solution is easy to integrate and does not require agents or resource-intensive management. Because data can be stored anywhere without changes to applications or workflows, it also allows for companies to leverage lower costs in the cloud.

To learn more about our technology, visit our resources page.