HashiCorp Predicts: What to Expect in 2023

Happy early New Year!

While HashiCorp provides great tools to our employees working remotely around the world, crystal balls are not standard issue. So we asked a selection of leaders from around HashiCorp to offer their insight into what to expect in the world of cloud and digital transformation in 2023.

Some of the trends they see, like multi-cloud and zero trust security, are already reshaping the enterprise technology landscape. Others, like the effect of uncertain macroeconomic conditions and the rise of AI, are only now coming into focus. Either way, we hope their predictions — based on their conversations with customers, partners, and community members, as well as their own unique insights — can help make sense of what’s sure to be another eventful year.

»Armon Dadgar: Co-Founder and CTO

• In 2023, even as multi-cloud acceptance is cemented as a reality, we will also see the need for private datacenters to do their part as an important place to run infrastructure as enterprises cope with cost concerns and data sovereignty issues.
• Demand for zero trust security will continue to be strong as complex cyber threats continue to grow.
• Look for vendor consolidation as smaller companies get acquired and customers choose fewer, more strategic partners.

»Harold Giménez: Vice President of R&D, Infrastructure Products

• The current environment calls for driving efficiencies and controlling spend, so we can expect organizations to double down on infrastructure automation while pushing standardization across all business units. This likely results in tooling consolidation, process efficiencies, centralized governance, and full visibility into the infrastructure estate.

»James Bayer: Executive Vice President of R&D, Secure Product Line

• We will see continued growth in Kubernetes and related ecosystem projects. Yet, because Kubernetes isn't the best choice for many workloads, there will also be an increase in specialized serverless platforms.
• As complex cybersecurity threats grow, security efforts will increase in earlier parts of the lifecycle. Look for more security work to be done upfront with automation and software supply chain security.

»Gurpreet Singh: Senior Vice President of Networking

• In 2023, as service mesh becomes more mainstream, we expect to see enterprises move their focus from health checks and service discovery to more advanced phases, involving secure connectivity (mTLS) and authorization.
• We will continue to see the need for zero trust security initiatives drive service mesh adoption in both large enterprises and the public sector.
• Simplifying service mesh deployments will continue to be the key priority for the industry, with initiatives such as sidecar-less mode and cloud-managed mesh offerings coming to the fore.
• Look for an increased focus on OpEx efficiencies as customers demand more operational maturity from their service mesh deployments, beyond just basic L7 connectivity and security. Built-in rich, granular, service/API flow-level observability, security, and automation capabilities will become increasingly important pieces of service networking product offerings and help drive the maturity and democratization of service mesh as a technology.

»Jeff Hoffman: Vice President of R&D, Applications Product Line

• We will finally see real movement in internal developer platforms delivered as a central service for organizations. Enterprises will start consolidating around best practices for abstracting infrastructure details away from their development teams’ approaches to building and deploying apps to multi-cloud (and on-premises) environments without having to build that platform internally from scratch. It remains to be seen how much of what organizations have already built will be able to be repurposed as processes if not executable code.

»Talha Tariq: Chief Security Officer

• I expect supply chain attacks to increase and become harder to detect and prevent.
• Organizations will look to tools to monitor more third-party risk.

»Sarah Polan, Field CTO - Europe, Middle East & Africa

• We will see a continued push towards EU data sovereignty, including new legislation requiring more resilient systems, better internal controls, and the possibility of state-mandated testing.
• This will require enterprises, especially in the EU, to shift their approach to cloud consumption.
• As a result, SaaS solutions and distributed architectures for centralized services will gain popularity as enterprises strive to maintain iterative speed and team performance.

»Adam FitzGerald, Vice President of Developer Relations

• We will see the expansion of AI into narrow technical spaces, including DevOps. The past couple of years have seen the rapid development of applications based on language models like GPT-3 from OpenAI. More narrowly, for technical audiences, GitHub’s Copilot has developed some very solid code scaffolding for developers. With more narrow domains like cloud architecture definitions and DevOps, I expect it to be possible for artificial intelligence services to learn and recommend best practices and common architectures.
• Increasing demand for cloud-engineering certification will be driven by employers’ need to ensure quality hiring as well as interest from cloud developers. Despite turbulence in the labor market, operators and architects who can stand out in a crowded market will be in high demand, especially if they can demonstrate practical or even expert knowledge of cloud infrastructure.

»Emily Day, Head of Real Estate & Workplace Experience

• Companies that are able to innovate by looking at the workplace through the lens of their employees' relationships will lead the pack in terms of team productivity, retention, and happiness.
• In 2023, the workplace conversation will shift from location-driven issues to focus on the employee experience. The goal will be to build a workplace, devoid of a particular location, that supports a group of people in a holistic way.