Predictions 2023: Economic Uncertainty and Climate Shifts Will Shape Edge, IoT, and Networking

Big city IoT and infrastructure initiatives to lure back citizens and workers will fall flat. In 2023, government funds, including the $89.9 billion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in the US, will power smart lighting, traffic management, and energy monitoring investments in cities. 5G and Wi-Fi deployments will extend connectivity to visitors, residents, and anywhere workers. However, these investments won't lure citizens back to big cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York in 2023 due to increased crime rates and public safety concerns. City leaders must focus on improving safety while addressing public disapproval of surveillance and public safety methods.

Smarter farming will take off in response to extreme weather and war. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, China and Russia accounted for over a quarter of global wheat exports. As global tensions rise, and weather events become more extreme, edge- and IoT-enabled food production will finally achieve meaningful scale in 2023. One vertical farm in Dubai produces over 1 million intensely monitored kilograms of leafy vegetables each year, without pesticides and using up to 95% less water than traditional methods. In the vast mechanized farmlands around the globe, ground, air, and space-borne sensors combine with edge processing and analytics to reduce water consumption and direct environmentally damaging chemicals to specific plants.

Rising businesswide networks, confidential computing, and Zero Trust edge (ZTE) will ignite the edge. To help protect data in IoT scenarios, confidential computing isolates sensitive operations in a trusted execution environment during processing. IoT data remains protected when in use, so it's easier to meet strict regulations for data privacy and to introduce new use cases. To support the transfer of data between edge and cloud while appearing seamless to the developer, two networking markets, ZTE and multicloud networking, will combine to create a businesswide networking fabric. Multicloud overlay solutions, such as Aviatrix and F5 Volterra, enable a single multicloud network platform.