As 2023 draws draws to a close, one thing is certain: this year has been rich in innovation and new developments in the IT sector! So, what are the key takeaways? We’ve pondered this question and prepared a concise retrospective of the year’s most significant IT advancements.
Enhanced Security in Managed IT Services
The evolving needs of businesses have led to corresponding changes in managed IT services. Following a 61% increase in cyberattacks against Swiss companies in 2022, these businesses have challenged their managed IT services to bolster cybersecurity.
We’ve seen notable advancements in Identity and Access Management (IAM), with a growing implementation of biometric technologies and multi-factor authentication.
System resilience has also become a priority, prompting system and network administrators to revise their strategies in backup, disaster recovery, and incident management to prevent any impact on business operations and their economic consequences.
AI in Web Development
At Qim info, we’ve always dismissed the notion that artificial intelligence could replace our beloved developers. However, it can certainly assist them!
This is exemplified byGitHub Copilot,an AI-powered code completion tool. Key features include:
- Real-time code generation to accelerate development.
- Error reduction through suggested edits.
- Solution proposals: Are your developers at their wit’s end, unsure how to tackle their lines of code? GitHub Copilot offers fresh perspectives to view your code in a new light.
However, it’s crucial to maintain a critical mindset and only use Copilot’s suggestions if they align with the context of your development project and its security protocols.
Cloud Tools Simplifying Daily Operations
VictoriaMetrics:This is THE solution for real-time monitoring and analysis of databases containing large amounts of data. This efficient open-source tool is designed to rapidly process diverse data types and easily integrate into clusters.. With its user-friendly interpretation, VictoriaMetrics is set to impress both your functional teams and developers.
Karpenter:For those interested in Cloud technologies, Kubernetes clusters are a familiar concept.. Even though it’s not always easy to use,Karpenter is a tool designed to facilitate cluster management and improve application performance.
KEDA:Consider KEDA (Kubernetes-based Event-Driven Autoscaling) as your efficient resource manager. What’s its role? To allocate the number of resources to an application based on the real-time demand. This not only helps in reducingcosts but also in optimizing the performance of your applications within a Kubernetes environment.
OpenTelemetry::Although OpenTelemetry wasn’t a newcomer in 2023, its usage remained highly popular throughout the year! So, here’s a quick reminder about this open-source project: its goal is to provide development and operational teams with a standardized way to instrument and gather data on the performance, traceability, and monitoring of their applications.
Microsoft releases new features
The search engine Microsoft Edge has returned to the spotlight, particularly with the integration of artificial intelligence into its search module to enhance user experience. However, the tool’s development goes even further. Microsoft has announced it is working on a Microsoft Edge solution specifically for businesses. New features will include, among others:
- The possibility for employees to automatically separate their professional and personal activities,
- Enhanced remote security options,
- XXX Workspaces to easily share tabs with team members.
The introduction of Microsoft Designer to the M365 suite also signals the tech giant’s ambition to venture into the world of graphic design tools. Competing directly with Canva, Microsoft Designer is designed to be an intuitive and accessible tool for effortlessly creating your materials and visuals, whether you’re a graphic designer or not.
While the list is extensive, we’ll conclude our roundup of M365 updates by mentioning the new Teams Premium subscription, which includes:
- Meeting optimisation through artificial intelligence, featuring automatic meeting minutes, subtitle translation, and more.
- Enhanced security for appointments, allowing the addition of confidentiality labels to meetings as needed, or watermarks on information shared during discussions.
- Improved management of client appointment calendars, with flexible scheduling and management of meetings, as well as report generation to analyse performance.
- Significant work has also been done on webinar registrations, their execution, and ways to maintain participant engagement.
Data made its mark in 2023
Artificial intelligence solutions like ChatGPT have left a significant imprint on 2023 and rightly earn their place in this retrospective. AI now plays a crucial role in businesses, serving as a tool for analysis and decision-making support. It features prominently in:
- Task automation: Gone are the days of lengthy, repetitive tasks. AI-driven automation allows analysts to focus on in-depth subjects with real added value.
- Analysis and interpretation: With its ability to rapidly analyse thousands of data points, AI identifies major trends, also known as predictive models. These bolster the analyses performed by Data teams and support strategic decision-making in companies. These trends can also aim to optimise internal business processes by highlighting process improvements, potential cost reductions, or new market opportunities.
However, another solution has also made a spectacular entry into the world of Data: Microsoft Fabric!
Microsoft Fabric is an analytics solution that centralises a comprehensive suite of tools, including data lakes, data engineering, and data integration, eliminating the need for multiple service providers.
The platform acts as a conductor, allowing developers to focus solely on creating applications rather than overseeing their deployment, integration, and updates.
As a SaaS solution, Microsoft Fabric ensures high application availability and proper inter-application communication.
This concludes our IT retrospective. We don’t know about you, but at Qim info, we’re excited to see what 2024 has in store!
