By Members of the Cribl Team
Enterprises
face a gauntlet of challenges in 2023. The threat of a recession looms,
staffing shortages and supply chain challenges persist, and eager security
attackers are preying on businesses when they're most vulnerable. Fortunately,
there are steps enterprises can take to manage these risks and gain control
over their most crucial assets.
Read on for three predictions from leaders at
Cribl to help IT and security leaders adapt their businesses and staffing to
counter the challenges ahead.
Data breaches
within managed service providers will shift risk unpredictably for MSP
customers
From
Jackie McGuire, Senior Market Strategy Manager, Cribl
Exacerbated by the pandemic and Great
Resignation, the security industry is short more than 3 million people (and
growing). This has forced many small and mid-sized enterprises to bring in
outside help, which is why we've seen an uptick in the managed service provider
(MSP) market - from Comcast's purchase of Masergy, to Google's Mandiant
acquisition and Microsoft Security Experts.
Companies are realizing that the true
risk-adjusted cost of managing an internal security operations center (SOC) is
both unsustainable and unaffordable. Transferring this risk to an MSP is alluring
- but it comes with a set of third-party risks and complications. For example,
if a customer is breached through the network of an MSP they hired to manage
their security, who pays the cost of that breach?
The dramatic increase in third, fourth, fifth,
etc. party risk introduced by reliance on software vendors and service
providers will necessitate new legislation and regulation, as well as new
third-party security frameworks. But most importantly, companies must gain
tighter visibility and control of their data (and their own customer's data,
where applicable) at every source and destination, with every vendor and
service provider. The ability to shut off data flowing to a compromised third
party will become critical to security operations, and hopefully a regulatory
requirement for any business handling sensitive data.
Companies
adopting an observability data strategy will save 30% more on their cloud costs
than competitors
From
Nick Heudecker, Senior Director of Market Strategy & Competitive Intelligence,
Cribl
As cloud migrations increased during the
pandemic, runway cloud spending was a consistent theme for CIOs and CFOs in
2022. Restoring control over cloud expenses is a key priority heading into
2023.
The problem with public cloud expenses is
summed up by the phrase, "It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission."
With unlimited resources a click away, IT and developers are never asking for
permission, leaving the CIO to beg for forgiveness. The traditional checks and
balances of on-premises expenditure - between engineering, finance, and
procurement - are easily bypassed in public clouds, creating a lack of
visibility into what resources are allocated and used until the bill is due.
Restoring visibility requires ingesting a
diverse set of data from across cloud providers. But with a variety of
standards, delivery timeframes, and granularity, it's been challenging to build
a comprehensive approach to cost visibility.
An observability data strategy will help
enterprises with this in 2023 and beyond. An observability data strategy offers
the visibility that will enable organizations to accelerate their FinOps
maturity from offline batch reporting to event-driven insights, and ensure
greater control over cloud spend. And you'll be asking for forgiveness much
less often.
Antitrust
investigations will materially impact large public cloud companies in 2023 and
2024
From Ed
Bailey, Senior Technical Evangelist, Cribl
Large public cloud providers have been
flooding the news with announcements about new products, from data warehouses
and database tools to advanced security platforms like SIEM. While the
burgeoning cloud ecosystem has been viewed as a net positive, serious antitrust
concerns are mounting as major public cloud providers host the IT
infrastructure for many, if not most, of their competitors.
As cloud spend slows in 2023, it's possible
we'll see large public providers engage in anticompetitive behavior in a
variety of ways to open new streams of revenue and support growth in a down
market. For example, a provider may offer lower pricing for its own competing
services if customers sign long-term contracts, or raise the cost for
competitors to egress data to its customers to make it more expensive to do
business.
DOJ antitrust investigations will bring needed
attention to how cloud providers lock customers in and compete with them at the
same time. Customers who are already in a major cloud will have to weigh their
options: Do they keep adopting the public cloud or look for a middle ground?
For companies that have not yet moved to cloud, do they change strategy and
stay on prem or seek a middle ground?
In 2023, current and future cloud customers
will likely seek a middle ground that will leverage the best parts of cloud
while mitigating the risks of public cloud provider lock-in. Enterprises will
look at other IT platform options like Equinix and QTS to promote independence;
they'll tie their on-prem data centers to the public cloud network fabric to
deploy elements of their IT stack to the right capability while retaining
strategic independence. This may also help improve cash management in the
process by taking advantage of capital expenditure dollars and lower operating
expenditure utilization.