The capabilities of cloud computing in 2023

AI could help usher in a four-day working week

Introducing AI into an organisations’ day-to-day operations is often a long-term ambition. However, when carried out successfully, AI offers numerous benefits including improving operations, automating processes and generating more fulfilling experiences for customers to name a few. Because of this, the use of AI in many business areas has skyrocketed in the last few years, and the trend is likely to continue throughout 2023.

Out-of-the-box APIs, that are available when a system is installed, will accelerate this adoption, providing a strong alternative for businesses that lack the time and resources to develop their own AI models. We can already see this in practice through tools like Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI, which is helping call centre teams take up to 28% more calls concurrently. This has positively impacted team members’ wellbeing. Meanwhile, thanks to tools like Recommendations AI, merchandising and ecommerce teams have increased customer conversions by 40% in the last year.

In 2023, one area where AI will be particularly instrumental is in increasing employee productivity, especially for software developers working on tight schedules. In addition to helping with software testing – like generating numerous test scenarios for developers – AI can speed up the painstaking process of code writing. What’s more, by 2025 developers could be able to complete a week’s worth of work in four days or less.

Cloud infrastructure decisions will be increasingly automated by AI and ML

Employee productivity isn’t the only area where new workloads such as AI and Machine Learning (ML) can help businesses. Demand on the industry’s cloud infrastructure has long been increasing, leading to an exponential growth in AI/ML capabilities to support this. To take one example, international telecommunications company Vodafone has embarked on a long-term partnership with Google Cloud to build a powerful integrated data platform and distributed system, supporting the creation of new digital products and services for customers.

Choosing the right cloud components has often proved quite daunting for businesses. However, in 2023, AI and ML will alleviate this burden. Developments will combine purpose-built frameworks, prescriptive architectures, and a viable network to ensure an optimised and reliable infrastructure. This will free up cloud architects to work towards cultivating innovation and business logic behind the infrastructure, instead of focusing on its principles.

The vast majority of security operations workloads will be automated

Security was a top priority for businesses in 2022, and will remain so this year.

External pressures are causing many organisations to attempt to speed up their digital transformations, meaning they are often finding it hard to single out the alerts and security areas to be investigated. Unsurprisingly, this situation is only further exacerbated by the increasing data volume, alert fatigue and financial costs faced across the board.
In the tech sector, organisations have struggled to generate efficient responses to risks due to the number of legacy tools still in operation, in tandem with increasingly demanding security engineering. But automation can help here. Last year, Google acquired leading cybersecurity service company Mandiant to bolster its security operations offerings and advisory services, whilst assisting customers in their response to security issues.

Developments like this mean that in 2023, companies may be able to divide threat detection into 90% automated and 10% manual, so security professionals can turn their attention to more critical and creative duties such as risk examination, responding to visibility issues and sharing security insights.

In doing so, professionals can foster increased knowledge sharing and establish viable connections with developers, ensuring teams are aligned on risks and responses.

Organisations using public cloud will freely switch their primary cloud provider as a result of available multi-cloud capabilities

According to recent studies, more and more businesses are embracing a multi-cloud strategy, forgoing their reliance on a single hyperscale cloud provider and looking to make a seamless transition from their first cloud to a second. To prepare for this, many businesses have already started investing in upskilling their employees, improving their technology and benefiting from a secondary cloud provider to stimulate cloud adoption.

In 2023, we are likely to see more companies opting for multicloud technologies to share not just work tasks but also ideas and knowledge, boosting collaboration between teams. Adopting a multi-cloud strategy can ultimately help businesses with cost optimisation, improved risk management, data scalability and resilience, to name a few.

Three-quarters of developers will have sustainability as their primary development principle

An increasing number of companies are already starting to prioritise sustainability over standard business targets like cost, safety and reliability. However, many are still unsure where to start. According to Google Cloud’s 2022 report on sustainable transformation, approximately 65% of IT professionals remain unsure of how to bolster sustainability efforts, and only 36% believe their organisations have measurement tools in place to track their sustainability development.

Fortunately, cloud providers have already taken significant steps – cloud computing can help companies understand how their practices impact the environment and offer tools to measure their sustainability progress. For instance, in August 2022 energy platform company Kaluza announced plans to adopt Google Cloud technology to boost energy visibility throughout its operations, with a goal to eliminate nearly 10 million tons of CO2 produced by 2030.

In 2023, we will witness a rise in the number of businesses seeking more sophisticated tools, similarly to Kaluza, to benchmark their sustainable initiatives as well as to analyse data around their carbon footprint and environmental impact.

It’s undeniable that 2023 will come with its challenges. However, innovations in cloud computing, such as the increasing use of AI and ML in businesses, and a wider adoption of cloud technology, such as the rise of multi-cloud, will enable organisations to remain resilient, uncover new opportunities and thrive in the year ahead.