Technology innovation is both a blessing and a curse. Organizations keen to drive sustainable growth in a world of economic and geopolitical uncertainty, must continually keep a watchful eye on the latest emerging trends. But these same developments might also expand the corporate cyber-attack surface to threat actors looking for new ways to disrupt operations and steal data.
The 2023 Gartner Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar provides a must-see glimpse into the industry innovations most likely to shape the future of tech. But IT leaders must also remember that, in order to drive successful digital transformation, they must get the security basics right—which means starting with data protection.
A glimpse into the future
Gartner’s research highlights 26 emerging trends which the analyst claims tech vendors and product leaders must respond to. These can be summarized in four key areas:
Smart world expansion to blend physical and digital experiences through trends and technologies like the metaverse, spatial computing, digital twins and AI avatars.
An accelerated productivity revolution thanks to innovation in AI capabilities like synthetic data, generative AI, and intelligent applications.
Transparency and privacy tools like responsible AI, human-centered AI and digital ethics, which are necessary due to the explosive growth in corporate and personal data collection.
New critical technology enablers like hyperscale edge computing, Web3 and tokenization which will help to “create new business and monetization opportunities.”
Why data-centric security matters
The above examples represent an exciting vision of the next eight years. But they also represent risk as well as opportunity for most organizations. There are many reasons why digital transformation projects fail. But one critical causal factor that is often not fully mapped and mitigated is cyber risk.
Consider an organization that wants to use digital twins to supercharge its manufacturing processes. Or hyperscale edge computing to reduce latency and optimize application performance. Or any number of AI tools to drive automation and gain real-time data insights. Without confidence that the data underpinning these models and technologies is safe from theft or tampering, projects might stall on security or compliance concerns. Even worse, organizations might ignore “data protection by design and default” best practices and plough on anyway. If they do, and that data is compromised by attackers, it could lead to serious financial and reputational damage and mean transformation initiatives are paused or shelved completely.
How comforte can help
In this context, data-centric security is a critical enabler of many emerging technologies like the ones listed by Gartner. At comforte, our Data Security Platform goes further, by delivering:
- Continuous AI-powered data discovery and classification
- Discovery of data even in hard-to-find places like cloud data stores
- Multiple protection methods which preserve utility
- Integration with data flows and apps, for accelerated time to value in emerging tech initiatives
One of the data protection methods offered by comforte is tokenization, which enables firms to continue using their data for AI, analytics and other projects without compromising on security. In fact, it is one of the “critical enabler” technologies cited by Gartner in this report. The analyst assesses that it is at “very high” mass—that is, it will have a substantial impact on existing products and markets.
With data-centric security in place, your organization will have the confidence to drive exciting new growth opportunities. That’s always been the comforte message, and now it’s also Gartner’s.
