2023 trends & predictions: Snowflake 

As India’s digital revolution looks to turn the next decade into a ‘tech’ade, cloud adoption is going to be crucial to this growth agenda. We are seeing more enterprises rapidly moving to cloud solutions to solve complex business challenges, become agile, and drive innovation. According to a 2022 NASSCOM report, cloud has the potential to account for  approximately 8 percent relative share of India’s GDP in 2026 with a 4X growth over the next five years, and create 14 million jobs in 2026, growing 3X over the next five years.

As we look forward to the new year, Vimal Venkatram, MD India at Snowflake, shares some key data trends to look out for in 2023.

 Prediction 1 – Board members will prioritize for actionable cybersecurity insights 

The rise of security data lakes in the cloud will make it much easier to generate near-real-time reports around critical security metrics. We have already seen increased interest at the executive level in this type of data, and in 2023, board members will demand transparency through quantified insights on the company’s security posture, areas of weakness, and rate of improvement. While standard in other departments, cybersecurity has been lagging in providing this visibility, and in 2023, will play a quintessential factor in safeguarding the business and its data.  

Prediction 2 – Retailers will embrace data monetization in response to macroeconomic pressures

In recent years, many retailers were allergic to the idea of data monetization and refused to discuss it. Today, as we move into 2023, almost every retailer is having these conversations at the c-suite and board levels. We are in a discovery phase as retailers realized that governance of data in the cloud enables them to do a lot with this data that they could not do previously, while also streamlining how CPG companies are able to acquire this data. Data monetization offers an exciting source for revenue, but retailers are going to make sure they’re leveraging this data to make better business decisions that are mutually beneficial for the retailer-CPG relationship.

Prediction 3 – Data clean rooms will be used to boost campaign performance

Talking about the Media and Entertainment sector, we saw early adoption with data clean rooms from media companies and publishers on the sell side in 2022 but in 2023, it’s going to reach across the entire advertising and marketing ecosystem. We’re in the midst of a mass realization of how drastically the collaboration, privacy and governance features of data clean rooms benefit all parties involved. We’re going to see improved campaign performance across the board as marketers evolve from targeting and measuring off of just their cookies, instead of just using their actual customer data to provide better targeting to improve marketing performance and measurement. Data clean rooms will shift from theoretical discussion to real world use-case.

Prediction 4 – Healthcare and pharmaceutical industries will, like retail, strengthen supply chains with open data sharing

In the healthcare sector, medical product shortages during the pandemic put the supply chain in sharp focus, but now, even as the health crisis has normalized, we’re still seeing shortages of common and important treatments. One of the core issues is that the industry has become single threaded in its sourcing strategy. In 2023, we’ll witness a course correction in healthcare. Drug and device manufacturers are no longer able to plan their supply chains with their OWN data alone. With investment in technology that facilitates bi-directional data sharing across the entire product journey; from manufacturer to the supplier and all the way down to the individual hospital or pharmacy, new levels of real-time visibility will create not just a more resilient supply chains but a more resilient healthcare system overall.

Prediction 5 – Application development will evolve into a two-way conversation between producers and consumers

Easy-to-use low-code or no-code platforms are already simplifying the building and sharing of interactive applications for tech-savvy and business users. Based on that, the next emerging shift will be a blurring of the lines between two previously distinct roles — the application producer and the consumer of that software. Application development will become a collaborative workflow where consumers can weigh in on the work producers are doing in real-time, for instance, by commenting on code. Taking this one step further, we’re heading towards a future where app development platforms have mechanisms to gather app requirements from consumers before the producer has even started creating that software.