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Increased Use of AI, Emerging Threats, and Shifts in Spending Priorities Will Mark 2024

By Utpal Bhatt, CMO, Tigera

The rapid pace of digital transformation continues to create new opportunities-and threats-for today's enterprises and small businesses. In 2023, generative AI entered the public consciousness, bad actors found new and more effective ways to wage their attacks, and economic conditions led many organizations to tighten their spending or change buying behaviors. We will see these trends become standard in the new year, and at the same time, become increasingly challenging and complex.

At Tigera, we spoke with our President & CEO, Ratan Tipirneni; and our Calico Cloud/Calico Runtime Threat Defense product leader, Malavika Balachandran Tadeusz to learn more about the trends they expect going into 2024.

Trends in Generative AI and Machine Learning

Hackers will start to leverage AI, creating a crisis

While this is an unintended consequence of great technology innovation, we will start to see evidence of the damage that AI in the wrong hands can cause. AI tools can help hackers increase their productivity by an order of magnitude. This will enable them to plant malware, find vulnerabilities, and exploit weak posture much faster. - Ratan Tipirneni, President & CEO

Maturation of ML infrastructure

More organizations are dipping their toes into generative AI and also increasing their investment in machine learning (ML) more broadly. There are so many operational challenges for platform teams that want to facilitate running ML jobs on cloud platforms. Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) is a hot topic at the moment but still in the early stages of adoption - we'll see advancements there as more organizations mature their ML infrastructure. - Malavika Balachandran Tadeusz, Senior Product Manager

Fighting Emerging Threats

We will see breaches related to Kubernetes in high-profile companies

While Kubernetes adoption has taken off, most Kubernetes teams haven't implemented adequate posture management controls. They continue to implement the minimal level of security mandated by compliance requirements. This bubble is about to burst.

This will manifest as stolen data (data exfiltration) or ransomware. However, this can be easily prevented through effective posture management to ensure that the right egress controls and micro-segmentation is in place. - Ratan Tipirneni, President & CEO

Prioritization of supply chain security

Supply chain security remains a top concern for security teams. Following the Executive Order in 2021 on cybersecurity, there was a huge focus on supply chain security, particularly as a requirement for FedRAMP. We'll see increased adoption of tools in the cloud security landscape that are focused on supply chain security. - Malavika Balachandran Tadeusz, Senior Product Manager

Shifts in Buying Behavior

Focus will shift to total cost of ownership and ROI

Open source software that is presumably free can have a significant cost to deploy and manage. Buyers will start to focus on this bigger "cost" picture to make decisions. - Ratan Tipirneni, President & CEO

SaaS spend slowdown

In today's economic environment, everyone is looking at where they can cut down costs, especially cloud infrastructure and SaaS spend. We'll see the growth of tools focused on helping people optimize their cloud spend and we'll also see churn from established SaaS players to lower-cost alternatives, especially in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and observability space. - Malavika Balachandran Tadeusz, Senior Product Manager

The speed of tech innovation and economic considerations will continue creating new opportunities and challenges for modern organizations. Through strategic solution adoption and working with the right partners, organizations can stay one step ahead.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Utpal Bhatt is the Chief Marketing Officer at Tigera.