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Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023: Applied Observability and Digital Immune System

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Gartner announced the list of 10 top strategic technology trends that organizations need to explore in 2023, and two technologies in particular will be of special interest to APMdigest readers: Applied Observability and Digital Immune System.

Gartner says this year's top strategic technology trends will drive significant disruption and opportunity over the next five to 10 years.

Digital Immune System

76% of teams responsible for digital products are now also responsible for revenue generation. CIOs are looking for new practices and approaches that their teams can adopt to deliver that high business value, along with mitigating risk and increasing customer satisfaction. A digital immune system provides such a roadmap.

In a recent Gartner article, Joachim Herschmann, Senior Director Analyst on the Application Design and Development team at Gartner, explains: "A digital immune system combines a range of practices and technologies from software design, development, automation, operations and analytics to create superior user experience (UX) and reduce system failures that impact business performance. A DIS protects applications and services in order to make them more resilient so that they recover quickly from failures"

Digital immunity combines data-driven insight into operations, automated and extreme testing, automated incident resolution, software engineering within IT operations and security in the application supply chain to increase the resilience and stability of systems.

Herschmann says the prerequisites for a strong digital immune system include:

■ Observability

■ AI-augmented testing

■ Chaos engineering

■ Autoremediation

■ Site reliability engineering (SRE)

■ Software supply chain security

Gartner predicts that by 2025, organizations that invest in building digital immunity will reduce system downtime by up to 80% — and that translates directly into higher revenue.

Applied Observability

Observable data reflects the digitized artifacts, such as logs, traces, API calls, dwell time, downloads and file transfers, that appear when any stakeholder takes any kind of action. Applied observability feeds these observable artifacts back in a highly orchestrated and integrated approach to accelerate organizational decision-making.

"Applied observability enables organizations to exploit their data artifacts for competitive advantage," said Frances Karamouzis, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. "It is powerful because it elevates the strategic importance of the right data at the right time for rapid action based on confirmed stakeholder actions, rather than intentions. When planned strategically and executed successfully, applied observability is the most powerful source of data-driven decision-making."

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023: Applied Observability and Digital Immune System

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Gartner announced the list of 10 top strategic technology trends that organizations need to explore in 2023, and two technologies in particular will be of special interest to APMdigest readers: Applied Observability and Digital Immune System.

Gartner says this year's top strategic technology trends will drive significant disruption and opportunity over the next five to 10 years.

Digital Immune System

76% of teams responsible for digital products are now also responsible for revenue generation. CIOs are looking for new practices and approaches that their teams can adopt to deliver that high business value, along with mitigating risk and increasing customer satisfaction. A digital immune system provides such a roadmap.

In a recent Gartner article, Joachim Herschmann, Senior Director Analyst on the Application Design and Development team at Gartner, explains: "A digital immune system combines a range of practices and technologies from software design, development, automation, operations and analytics to create superior user experience (UX) and reduce system failures that impact business performance. A DIS protects applications and services in order to make them more resilient so that they recover quickly from failures"

Digital immunity combines data-driven insight into operations, automated and extreme testing, automated incident resolution, software engineering within IT operations and security in the application supply chain to increase the resilience and stability of systems.

Herschmann says the prerequisites for a strong digital immune system include:

■ Observability

■ AI-augmented testing

■ Chaos engineering

■ Autoremediation

■ Site reliability engineering (SRE)

■ Software supply chain security

Gartner predicts that by 2025, organizations that invest in building digital immunity will reduce system downtime by up to 80% — and that translates directly into higher revenue.

Applied Observability

Observable data reflects the digitized artifacts, such as logs, traces, API calls, dwell time, downloads and file transfers, that appear when any stakeholder takes any kind of action. Applied observability feeds these observable artifacts back in a highly orchestrated and integrated approach to accelerate organizational decision-making.

"Applied observability enables organizations to exploit their data artifacts for competitive advantage," said Frances Karamouzis, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. "It is powerful because it elevates the strategic importance of the right data at the right time for rapid action based on confirmed stakeholder actions, rather than intentions. When planned strategically and executed successfully, applied observability is the most powerful source of data-driven decision-making."

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

Hot Topics

The Latest

The enterprises that will define the next decade are not the ones that deployed the most technology. They are the ones who understood what their technology was actually doing. That distinction is not a philosophical point. It is the central operational challenge facing every organization that has spent the last five years modernizing at speed ...

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...