We are seeing businesses across industries engage with large-scale projects needing a talent pool experienced in AI, cloud, IoT, or other emerging technologies. However, the fluctuating nature of these projects requires a flexible workforce, which can only naturally comprise part-time hires. This is why we see a steady investment in the staff augmentation market. The 2023 evaluation for the IT staff augmentation market was approximately USD 300 billion in the recent market reports.

A software update failure led to one of the most infamous outages of the year: the Crowdstrike Outage. The incident is estimated to have cost Fortune 500 companies more than USD 5 billion. Per the congressional testimony by Crowdstrike’s officials, the downtime wasn’t attributed to a malicious attack but a configuration and software update failure. Incidents like these make us question how we deal with our digital ecosystems - the configurations, the monitoring, the testing, etc.