Tech trends 2023

Dr. Thomas King, CTO at DE-CIX, has picked five trends that will drive the evolution of technology and the interconnection business in 2023.

1. Cloud to cloud communication

As concerns about cloud concentration risk grow, more businesses are adopting a multi-cloud strategy. A multi-cloud strategy not only mitigates the over-reliance on one provider, but also allows businesses to pick the best services from different cloud providers and prevents vendor lock-in. But simply sourcing services from multiple clouds is not in itself a complete solution – you need to think about interoperability between all cloud environments. Cloud routers on interconnection platforms will become more widespread in 2023, enabling high performance cloud-to-cloud communication, so that the different applications in different clouds can interact with each other as if they were hosted in the same cloud.

2. Scaling up 5G use cases 

It has been around for years but the deployment of 5G is still only in its infancy. We already have 5G on our mobile phones, but that is just the radio access network (RAN), rather than edge networking, service virtualization, and function chaining, etc., which are envisioned as features that will come with software integration. As companies begin to use 5G for IoT at scale and productize it, we will see a further evolution of the technology stack to meet growing commercial demands.

3. Connectivity resilience

For digital business, incidents and outages are a growing concern. Therefore, there is a drive to build company connectivity so that it minimizes the impact of external events on data flows relating to operations and business continuity. A “multi-X strategy” – using multiple technologies, multiple locations, and multiple providers – is an excellent solution for the design of company-own and outsourced infrastructure. By building multiple layers of redundancy, it is possible to design a company’s digital infrastructure for critical data flows to prevent single points of failure.

4. Network as a Code

Network as Code is the next big thing in connectivity infrastructure. As digital infrastructure becomes more and more important for businesses, it is also becoming more complex and harder to manage. Network as Code is a technology that enables the programmability of the different network components in order to develop network architecture as software. This makes it possible to leverage all of the advantages coming out of the software industry, such as repeatability, versioning, and continuous configuration automation.

5. Building the foundation for the immersive tactile Internet

The immersive tactile Internet aka the “metaverse”, has been gaining ground in the past few years: A digitally engineered 3-dimensional virtual space, where digital twins of ourselves will interact in an environment that blurs the line between the physical and the virtual. To enable this, each of us will need to be well-equipped with sophisticated gadgetry powered by VR and AI, which will be interconnected in a fine mesh of high-performance networks to ensure the synchronized and seamless delivery of video, audio, sensory, and cyber-locational data to and from our physical locations.