As 2024 begins, business decision-makers are looking ahead to the upcoming year to begin defining their overarching priorities. There is no area of business where doing so is more challenging than in the information technology sphere. It is a dynamic space that moves quickly and witnesses countless new developments with each passing month.
The good news is that we, here at Outsource IT, are always on top of the latest developments in IT, making us uniquely qualified to forecast the key innovations that will define the year. In this article, we discuss the most important IT innovations and trends businesses should be looking forward to in 2024.
As always, cybersecurity will be a primary area of concern for businesses in 2024. However, this year, there will be a pronounced shift in the way many businesses go about defending themselves from the latest cyber threats. While previous cybersecurity policies relied primarily on incident detection and response, the new approach will lean more on continuous threat exposure management (CTEM).
CTEM is a proactive approach to cybersecurity that involves monitoring, evaluating, and mitigating security risks as they pertain to a specific business. In other words, it does not wait for an attack to happen before taking action. Instead, it relies on continual scanning of a business’s attack surface and vulnerabilities to identify weaknesses and address them before an exploit can occur.
The CTEM approach also enhances a business’s overall defensive posture by enabling the business to prioritize the mitigation of vulnerabilities as they are discovered. This makes it possible to deploy scarce IT resources to the greatest possible effect by addressing issues with a high likelihood of exploitation immediately while triaging everything else.
For years, scientists worldwide have warned that the risk of climate change poses a clear and present danger to continued life on our planet. However, businesses at large have only just begun to wrestle with the impact their IT operations have on the problem. In 2024, that will finally change as more and more businesses make sustainability a key IT priority going forward.
As a part of that, more businesses will consider the lifecycle of their IT hardware, from how it is produced to how it will eventually be disposed of, as a component of their hardware acquisition processes. They will also weigh the environmental costs of their cloud operations, favoring cloud operators that rely on renewable electricity and leverage energy-efficient server hardware to reduce power usage. These considerations will form the main thrust of a move toward green cloud computing, which most experts believe can and must be the future of the cloud industry.
Finally, businesses will begin to bring their IT sustainability efforts together into a new strategic focus known as GreenOps. The idea will be to track and measure the environmental impact of the business’s IT operations, making sustainability a key performance indicator that decision-makers can factor into their future plans.
In 2024, AI-developed software products will also begin making their way onto business desktops, servers, and devices. Already, a significant number of software developers use AI code generation to speed up development cycles. They have done so as big tech companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, IBM, and others have made AI coding tools widely available. Microsoft has even begun rolling out its Copilot app on Windows 11 desktops, putting AI generative coding tools in the hands of non-developers.
As the year progresses, businesses can expect that more of the software and platforms they rely on will contain AI-generated code. By the year’s end, the majority of business applications and platforms will probably include it. As a result, businesses will need to vet their software and technology vendors to see how they have integrated AI into their development processes. Of particular concern is how those vendors are addressing the security concerns that come with generative AI coding. Worryingly, at least one user study has already found that code developed using AI tools tends to have more security vulnerabilities than those that do not.
This will open up a potential new front in the ongoing cybersecurity struggle businesses face. It could, at least in the near term, raise the prospect of an increase in so-called zero-day attacks as hackers look to exploit early examples of AI-generated software code. This is another reason why the aforementioned move toward a CTEM cybersecurity approach will be so pronounced within the year.
Finally, 2024 will see existing cryptography standards evolve to include quantum resistance as quantum computers inch closer and closer to practical use. Right now, most experts agree that existing quantum computers do not pose a threat to current cryptography standards. However, advances in quantum-enabled decryption have already shortened the theoretical breakout time associated with an attack on existing cryptographic systems. At the same time, these advances have decreased the hardware requirements of such an attack, bringing them far closer to what is already possible in the realm of quantum computing.
As a result, businesses—starting with those in sensitive industries like defense, medicine, and finance—will begin discussing how and when to upgrade their core encryption methods. There are already a handful of successor encryption algorithms showing promise, such as the CRYSTALS Kyber algorithm for public-key cryptography. In the US, it has won the seal of approval from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which approved it for public use beginning this year. It will likely be the first quantum-resistant encryption standard that businesses will have access to. Expect to see it in real-world business use by the end of this year, and likely sooner.
At the end of the day, the innovations and trends mentioned above will be just the tip of the iceberg. Due to the unpredictable nature of developments in the IT space, it is impossible to predict what other unexpected innovations may emerge to reshape the industry within the year.
That is why it is so important for businesses to have technology experts like Outsource IT on their side. We offer a variety of services, ranging from IT consulting to managed and co-managed IT services to help businesses meet their technology needs. We also specialize in business IT security, making us the ideal partner for any business looking to stay safe amidst an ever-evolving threat landscape. Contact one of our knowledgeable account managers today to learn more.
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