Actueel — Blog
The world of IT moves fast. And every year it seems as if developments are moving even faster. What should you focus on as an organisation in these chaotic times? We spoke to Hugo Peters, Strategic Architect and member of the CTO Office, and Rogier Heijligers, Sales & Marketing Director, about the main IT focal points for the time ahead.
AI, AI, and more AI
In 2023, thanks to ChatGPT, we got to taste the power of modern AI and the development and deployment of (generative) AI tools exploded. In 2024, we will see more and more concrete practical solutions: the beginning of a transformation towards fully AI-enabled IT. Gartner predicts that by 2030, every euro spent on IT will contain an AI component. This overarching trend towards AI has several ‘undercurrents’ and force fields that will have a lot of impact on almost all aspects of work.
AI can also be a lifesaver for IT departments. There is still a ‘war for talent’; it is difficult for organisations to attract and retain good staff with the right knowledge. The integration of AI into the management environment can make the configuration of IT solutions easier and allow problems to be found and solved faster. This can offer huge benefits for system administration in particular: administrators will have to perform less manual work, freeing up more time for interesting substantive work. Therefore, it won’t be long before scarce talent in the labour market starts seeing AI as a condition of employment. It is clear that AI can make people’s jobs easier. At the same time, some organisations are banning all use of AI out of fear, misplaced or otherwise. There are plenty of reasons to properly regulate the use of AI, including security, compliance and legal risks. But banning AI altogether is not wise. In the long run, it deprives your organisation of an awful lot of competitiveness. Moreover, it therefore seems that AI will soon be seen as a condition of employment. So why should the talent you would like to attract to you have to do everything manually!
More focus on people
The strong focus on AI goes hand in hand with a trend in the opposite direction: more focus on humans. Who is ‘the end user’ of a digital workplace and what are the actual needs? Because just because a workplace has the necessary functionalities does not mean that the end user is actually happy. When you spend most of your working day behind a computer, technology determines your work happiness to a very large extent. Systems that don’t work or are cumbersome or complex lead to frustration and dissatisfaction. And frustration and dissatisfaction is exactly what you cannot use in an extremely tense labour market.
When selecting and rolling out new technology, organisations should put the user experience at the centre. This can be done by focusing less on sec technology and more on functionality and ease of use. For convenience, let’s take AI as an example. The chosen solution can be as sophisticated and powerful as it is, but if the tech is not properly integrated into the workplace, you get frustrated employees who don’t want to use it; if it does work, AI can actually enhance the use of all workplace technology. We explicitly see the adoption of AI as a vital change process aimed at fully exploiting the potential of digital work environments. In this respect, AI is not only the ‘next step’ in terms of functionality, but also a critical driver of workplace adoption. For instance, a Microsoft Copilot can help users use previously unknown features in their work, in an efficient, secure way. This ensures a better user experience, fewer frustrations and more satisfied employees.
Security becomes even more of a top sport
Ransomware and phishing campaigns are now old friends in the security world. Yet security teams will have to work at an even higher level, as the technology available to malicious actors becomes more sophisticated every year. Here, too, AI is making a big contribution. If data protection within a corporate network is not up to scratch, AI-driven attacks can capture sensitive information faster. Internally, AI also poses a risk of data leakage when the same sensitive information is used to train an AI model. Every task for that model becomes a potential leak in that case. So the impact of AI on security needs to be well thought through. This starts with a thorough inventory of the existing frameworks for data protection and security. The starting point here is the ‘least privilege’ principle, whereby access rights are only granted on the basis of user roles. This is by no means a new concept, yet employees within numerous organisations often still get access to data they shouldn’t have access to at all. And if your employees have access, it’s completely a breeze for AI.
A Zero Trust approach is an extension of the least privilege principle. By properly zoning environments and constantly monitoring for contextual user behaviour, you can respond more quickly to suspicious activity. Secure Service Edge solutions (SSE) support this approach. SSE provides context-dependent micro-segments, granting only strictly necessary access, and continuously checking that everything is secure. Network traffic scanning no longer takes place on a traditional firewall, but is performed in the cloud. This makes it possible to scan web traffic not only when employees are in the office, but also as soon as they log in remotely. Security is thus detached from physical locations and offered centrally from the cloud. This fits much better in a world where we work less and less in the office and applications and files are in the cloud. Finally, AI also plays a role in the “arms race” between companies and criminals. Just as criminals use AI to carry out attacks, organisations can use it to detect and stop attacks in smarter ways. Consider, for example, intelligent scanning and SIEM solutions that help analyse and prioritise incidents. And mind you, the urgency to arm yourself with AI-driven security tools is high. Because you can’t protect yourself from a drone attack with a prop gun!
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