As we near the end of 2023 it is time to start planning your 2024 IT roadmap. There are four main categories that we think will be major considerations, even the driving force, behind where time and money will likely be spent in the coming year. The main categories include: zero trust, multi-cloud, automation, and AI.

Zero Trust/Enterprise Browser

Data breaches have become almost routine this year. From major identity and security vendors to two major casinos, nobody has been immune to security breaches. If a casino, a place dedicated to securing its ability to get you to spend money, can have a slip up lead to the exposure of customer data, it can happen to anyone. When the repercussions cause a casino to shut down gambling, you can bet (pun intended) that they will consider all ways to secure their systems.

No system will be completely infallible, but limiting exposure is the goal. The days are gone when enterprises can assume that because they issued a known user, a known device that security is ensured. Now is the time to invest heavily in zero trust solutions. Working from home, coffee shops, or the office, the enterprise can no longer afford to assume the end user is who they say they are. It must look at who they are, where they are, what they are using to access, what they are accessing, and more to determine if that access should be allowed.

Solutions that require users to prove themselves, devices to prove themselves, and even apps to prove themselves will become the norm in 2024. Solutions like Citrix Secure Private Access and Entra Private Access let admins focus on giving the right level of access for a given context, but not more. These solutions can be married together with device management tools like Intune to gain a full perspective on the user, the device, and where that combination is to provide real-time, appropriate access.

The enterprise browser, often a part of a zero-trust solution, will become something with which more and more users and IT admins will become familiar. Enterprise browser is not just standardizing on Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge, it’s a tool the containerizes the browser and allows for more granular control. Being able to adapt the browser experience based on what system is being accessed, where it is being accessed from, and who is accessing it, will change the user experience. This adaptive experience will allow organizations to limit their exposure.

Hybrid Multi-Cloud

A few years back, it was “everything to public cloud, no more datacenters.” Then it switched to “public cloud costs are too high, bring it back.” Now that the pendulum has finished its major swings, companies are starting to realize where best to utilize public cloud vs private cloud vs hosted private cloud. It’s often a combination of all of them. The challenge is that the percentages of the combination can change quickly.

Organizations will have to determine what does their IT footprint looks like and where it will be. The even bigger question they must address is how do they go back and forth? Depending on the headcount and expertise within an organization, trying to operate an on-premises infrastructure and a cloud native simultaneously in the same manner just doesn’t scale. The tooling and procedures are different enough that the effort becomes daunting. Additionally, many customers are leveraging public cloud as only a DR location. While this is a great use case, it makes DR much more challenging. DR is a challenge to get everything back up and going in like-for-like; getting systems back up and aligned in a different operating platform just adds to the challenge.

A major way to address this is by leveraging solutions that allow you to transfer everything directly to the cloud and operate it no differently than you would on-premises. Nutanix NC2 gives organizations this ability to shift workloads to Azure or AWS or both, without having to change the operating paradigm. Nutanix is Nutanix regardless of where it runs. So, you can have your main cluster in your datacenter, with a small cluster running in Azure or AWS. If needed, that Azure or AWS cluster can expand to meet your needs by replicating your workloads, and in the event of a disaster or even planned maintenance, they can be up and running with no reconfiguration.

This means you don’t have to have the discussion of “Is the outage significant enough to failover?” because everything else is the same. The added benefit of hibernating the cluster in AWS (soon for Azure) also allows for cost-effective DR. No need to pay for compute all the time; simply activate the cluster for replication and hibernate it for when it isn’t needed.

If your organizations’ IT partner is not giving you options to make your data and applications portable across clouds, you may want to carefully reconsider that partner. The options out there are far too great to lock an organization into a path just because a partner dictates it. Cloud portability should be considered standard.

Automation

Automation is no longer a nice-to-have or a competitive differentiator. It is a requirement. The speed at which technology is changing dictates the need to adapt quickly. Even more so, the vendor landscape has changed and will continue to change, necessitating the ability to be agile. On another note, Forrester predicts that up to twenty percent of current VMware customers will move away from the VMware stack. Organizations need to be flexible enough to handle this changing landscape and move at the pace the vendors change things, and businesses dictate the desire to move.

One thing is for certain, there is significant flux in the IT vendor space right now, with mergers, restructuring, and service offering changes. Organizations can decide to be upset or adapt. Leveraging automation tools that allow an organization to deploy or redeploy will save them money in the long run. It will take an initial investment if it hasn’t already been made, but companies must get into this mindset.

Traditional platform migrations will be a thing of the past. Automating infrastructure with code will allow for the flexibility organizations require. Whether it be a platform change, planning for a code upgrade, building out a DR environment, or building out a test environment, having the full build automated will allow business to perform those changes on demand rather than if able. No longer will they need to coordinate multiple teams and resource schedules. Merely update the deployment code and run. This can help ensure that the organization is less constrained.

To make this happen, system administrators and application specialists are going to need to further cross-train. System admins need to better understand software development methods and infrastructure. Application specialists are going to need to understand infrastructure services like Nutanix, firewalls and networking, and other non-traditional areas. This partnership, while technical in nature, will help deliver value to businesses that embrace it.

AI

AI is not something new, but ChatGPT and its cousins finally made it accessible to the masses. This has led to some missteps by some, but overall, it has helped many solve common problems quicker. Now, OEMs are looking at how to add AI into all their products to increase value. For some, this could be a pure marketing move, while others have legitimate value. Organizations are going to need to carefully evaluate this to make sound decisions.

The primary concern with accessible AI is security. Not the “the machines are going to take over the world” type security, but more around data sovereignty. With ChatGPT, it was easy, just don’t put your trade secrets directly into the website. But it has already become more difficult to understand the impacts. Take the example of the Zoom and its terms of service fiasco. Regardless of whether Zoom would have used a customer’s recording to train its models or not, it made people open their eyes. These recordings would potentially have trade secrets in them. Office 365, with its co-pilot services, will have similar possibilities. Microsoft and Zoom aren’t the only ones, just recognizable. A thorough understanding of the service and how they handle your data will change the security landscape. Now, security administrators must be involved to understand and address second order effects of AI-enabled technology.

Organizations need to wrestle with how to operationalize these services. What policies are going to be in place to make sure they are used properly, data is not being exfiltrated knowingly or unknowingly, and how to leverage those services to improve the organization? These are questions that need to be wrestled with not only for 2024 but even today. This area of technology will continue to evolve both for corporate and personal technology.

Plan Your 2024 IT Roadmap with Choose Choice Solutions

We predict that 2024 is going to be a year of change. Some changes will assuredly be unexpected, but there is also an opportunity for amazing possibilities. The technologies above provide organizations with a great opportunity to prepare themselves for the future. Act quickly to adopt them, but also remain open to changing how they might change. Commit to the solution, but understand it may not be what you thought it was. Contact us to learn more and see how we can help take your IT to the next level in 2024.