Heed these enterprise data and cloud market trends as 2023 recession looms
Data Infrastructure Weekly
In this week's briefing, we cover key trends in enterprise data and cloud you should prepare for next year, including the need to cut cloud costs and continue investment in digital transformation.
Enterprise data strategy trends to watch for 2023
Due to the fast-changing nature of the enterprise data market, tech leaders should constantly update their organizations' data strategies. A robust and dynamic data strategy must adapt to evolving technologies, customer demands, markets, business needs and practices, regulations and much more. Consider this overview of key trends that will significantly impact data strategies in the near- and mid-term future, including the growing use of real-time data, the proliferation of data analytics across the organization and the increasing adoption of data fabric and data mesh adoption.
Need to cut cloud costs without diminishing value?
Many experts warn that scrutiny of cloud computing spending will likely intensify as enterprises look to cut costs. Indeed, CIOs and CTOs could see their cloud programs soon end up on the chopping block. To help, McKinsey has released a report detailing five cost-cutting measures that can lead to quick reductions from 15% to 25% for enterprise cloud programs that will still allow them to retain their value-generating capabilities.
The battle for public cloud dominance among providers is intensifying according to Gartner's recently-released 2022 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services. The report, which assesses the overall cloud market and explores the strengths and weaknesses of top providers, warns that the cloud infrastructure and platform services market is evolving quickly, with providers focusing on moving enterprise customers deeper into the platform-as-a-service layer where margins are higher and extricating workloads and processes is more cumbersome. Gartner's analysts advise companies to avoid getting locked into a single cloud provider or face higher spending and software licensing issues. The research firm also warns against "strong-arm tactics," "negative" and "unscrupulous" behavior in the sector.
Freshpaint promises more readily accessible customer data
Freshpaint, which seeks to help data, product and other non-engineering teams leverage customer data without relying heavily on software engineers, has raised $14.5m in financing. Freshpaint's data infrastructure platform is designed to help enterprises ease the burden on engineering teams and third-party data providers to manage complex customer data acquisition and analytics processes that feed the data pipeline. Freshpaint offers automated tools to non-engineering teams that capture and activate customer data across hundreds of integrations including Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Iterable, Braze and Snowflake - all without relying on engineering.
Despite looming recession, data and analytics investments considered good ROI
Although a recession is expected next year, analysts predict enterprises will continue with their digital transformation, which means spending on data, analytics and AI projects will stay strong. IT spending would appear to be recession-proof as business leaders say their top investments areas for 2023 will be cyber and information security, business intelligence/data analytics and cloud platforms. Investment in these areas will remain robust as CIOs shift attention from back-office automation to customer-facing initiatives that leverage data, analytics and AI to power growth at a time of uncertain economic headwinds.
Dataops startup Kaboola raises $4.5m to integrate enterprise data stacks on single platform
Organizations aspiring to be data-driven often struggle with the management of a full-fledged data stack: It's expensive to integrate the required tools and tech, and it takes time and resources to maintain that data infrastructure. Prague-based Kaboola has raised $4.5m in a seed round to help resolve the problem. Built on Snowflake, Kaboola's platform integrates the whole data stack on a single interface, providing a developer-friendly back-end that supports API integrations to various tools from the modern stack. It also features a no-code front-end that non-technical business users can easily operate to mobilize data.
Don't mistake talk of enterprise tech modernization - especially in relation to cloud migration - to mean the demise of the mainframe. In reality, most large organizations rely on their mainframe to power back-end applications and provide on-premise power to modern digitalization. Tech leaders should ensure they have the right people in charge of their mainframes, especially with the pool of relevant talent decreasing and concern among employers that their staff can properly maintain such legacy systems.
Cloudbrink emerges from stealth to offer remote connectivity
Cloudbrink has nailed $25m in funding with what it says is a more secure way to handle distributed connectivity, an industry-first hybrid access-as-a-service that it claims solves various flaws in traditional SD-WAN solutions in order to improve performance, latency, security and mobility of networking for remote workers. Cloudbrink helps enterprises extend their networks to cover employees wherever they are, offering a software that compresses the traditional connectivity stack into a downloadable app on any device so that specialized hardware isn't required on either end of the connection.
