2022 has seen much disruption, with the global economy slowing down, inflation rising, companies laying off people, and big tech no longer holding the imagination of the public as it once did.

Next year is said to be worse, so now is a good time to plan for the potential opportunities and threats in your industry.

Companies still need to run their businesses efficiently, using the best tools and human resources available. However, considering the new innovative cloud technologies, you can do more with less.

Therefore, it would be a good idea to take stock of your legacy infrastructure and see what can be made more effective with the cloud.

If before you needed to invest immense capital expenditure for servers, software, and specialists, you can now spin up a new cloud service on demand and turn off features when demand is low.

This also makes scaling issues a thing of the past and is more cost-effective than having servers constantly on full blast.

Even Twitter is using the cloud. Thus any future Steve Jobs or Elon Musk can build something new more quickly and cost-effectively than ever before without worrying about increasing payroll and maintaining expensive equipment.

Here are a few things businesses should prepare for in 2023:

Embracing Low-Code/No-Code Technologies

Before, you needed a Ph.D. in computer science to make a simple algorithm; now, with the advent of low-code / no-code tools, you can create complicated programs to build your business or make your processes more efficient.

You can already develop websites and customer experience apps, as well as automate internal accounting and web applications with these tools. There is even a Twitter clone using low-code tools!

In addition, many tools can help modernize your business. Cloud services such as Canva, Figma, Airtable, and others have already been proven to help small and big companies reach the next level. Cloud services are definitely coming to its Hollywood spotlight.

Introduce Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning solutions for Your Company

If AI and ML were seen as software solutions of the future, that future is here now, accessible to more people than ever.

For example, open source solutions such as Stable Diffusion, a deep learning, text-to-image model that can generate detailed images based on text descriptions, can eliminate the need for graphic artists or illustrators from a business stack.

At the moment, it does require a lot of power and high-end tech specs, but you can host them on cloud services at a competitive rate.

There are bound to be more new projects based on AI and ML in the coming months, not years. And already, many Indonesian companies are beginning to join this revolution.

Increase Security Protocols and Awareness

The cloud offers efficiencies, scalability, and flexibility for business but as usual, with great power comes great responsibility (for corporate and user data).

As a result, governments worldwide are beginning to strengthen data regulations with financial and legal penalties, while cyberterrorism has yet to be eradicated.

Security should be the responsibility of a company and its stakeholders. 2023 will see an increasing number of people become more aware of their data and cyber security protocols to help protect themselves from potential cyber harm.

Ensure your employees are updated in their security protocols and password hygiene.

Combat Recession with Multi-Cloud Adoption

The global outage of WhatsApp and KakaoTalk a while back illustrates the dangers of relying on a single platform. Small and medium businesses that heavily depend on these two platforms suffered tremendous lost opportunities and revenue.

A multi-cloud approach would offer improved flexibility and security as it can create redundancy and prevent downtime from a single-platform outage.

The distributed cloud can help businesses increase flexibility and scalability, thus allowing them to spread their workloads across private, public, and hybrid clouds.

In addition, multi-cloud management is no longer complicated as it can offer visibility and control over their distributed cloud environments, allowing them to optimize their workloads and ensure that they run efficiently.

As developers favor containerized applications, companies can quickly port critical applications should more efficient solutions come online from alternative cloud service providers.

Also, multi-cloud management solutions can provide security and compliance features to help protect corporate workloads from potential threats.

Finally, the distributed cloud model can help businesses manage their corporate workloads across multiple environments.

For a country like Indonesia, which is rapidly leapfrogging over older technologies, there are opportunities in the above four segments as the country needs more specialists and developers to go to the next level.

Knowledge is just a click away; all it takes is finding the area of interest that can help build or accelerate your business. Big or small.

Surung Sinamo is the country manager of F5 Indonesia, the local arm of F5, a multi-cloud application services and security company.

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