Preparing for Evolving Regulations and Data Sovereignty – As organizations strive to meet the demands of today’s digital-first customers, they are modernizing at a faster rate than ever before. But at the same time, they need to balance innovation with growing regulatory requirements and data sovereignty laws. With regulatory requirements like DORA heating up across the globe, compliance will be top of mind for business leaders in the year ahead – and concerns will be even greater for those in highly regulated industries such as financial services and those handling client personal information. In fact, more than half of business and technology leaders believe ensuring compliance in the cloud has been too difficult according to a recent study by IBM. As the proliferation of cloud technologies gains more oversight from regulators and introduces emerging operating models for the industry like Sovereign Cloud, organizations will need to adopt technologies that allow them to drive innovation while adhering to growing requirements in 2023 and beyond.

Enterprises Will Leverage the Power of Mainframe & Cloud in Modernization – As organizations move further into their hybrid and multicloud journeys, their focus has shifted towards determining which workloads go where. Organizations have started to take inventory of their IT environments to select which workloads and applications are best suited for the cloud and which should remain on-premises. In 2023, more organizations will realize it’s not mainframe OR cloud – it’s mainframe AND cloud. By strategically bringing together cloud and mainframe, organizations can experience enhanced levels of innovation, speed and security. To drive success in today’s hybrid cloud world, we will see more organizations leverage the combined power of mainframe and cloud in the year ahead.

Closing Security Gaps Across Hybrid Cloud Environments with a Holistic View – While more than 77% of organizations have adopted a hybrid cloud approach, less than a quarter manage their cloud environments holistically. This means the majority of organizations are suffering from a Frankencloud construct – a set of cloud deployments that are so disconnected it’s nearly impossible to secure – and they don’t even know it. As organizations prepare for 2023, they will need to implement holistic security strategies that give them a comprehensive view of their data across hybrid cloud environments – whether data lives on-prem, across public or private clouds or at the edge. At the same time, organizations must start preparing for the future threats of tomorrow. As quantum computing grows more sophisticated and poses potential risks, such as the ability to quickly break encryption algorithms and access sensitive data, we’ll see more enterprises show interest in quantum-safe cryptography and security to keep data protected from being tampered, hacked or manipulated.

The Rise of High Performance Computing – In today’s evolving business landscape, the ability to conduct analyses and make decisions fast is critical to remaining competitive. For highly regulated industries such as financial services, this is even more important as these insights can be used to reduce risk. Next year, we’ll see more financial services organizations explore the benefits of high performance computing to help them quickly conduct risk analysis, make decisions faster and confidently meet regulatory requirements.

-By Hillery Hunter, GM, Cloud Industry Platforms & Solutions; CTO IBM Cloud.