The Year Ahead: Data Will Drive the Enterprise in 2019
The year just ending has been an interesting one for data managers. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning took center stage, which also meant an increasingly glaring spotlight on data sourcing, management, and viability. The continued rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) also meant no letting up on demands for data environments to deliver requirements fast and furiously. The year ahead will bring more of the same—as well as a continuation of the transformation of information management.
Here are some of the changes and challenges on the horizon for 2019, as seen by leading industry participants and observers.
MASSIVELY DISTRIBUTED DATA GETS EVEN MORE DISTRIBUTED
Things keep moving away from the center. As Ken Tsai, global VP and head of cloud platform and data management for SAP, put it, customers’ data now sits in an average of six to eight clouds, as well as their own data centers. “This is contributing to the rapid evolution of data processing technologies to become massively distributed,” he said. He added that “data integration technologies are shifting from extract-transform-load to a process- and pipeline-driven approach, with data management and governance capabilities to support both centralized and federated models.”
At the same time, Tsai cautioned, this high level of distribution will “increase cost and complexity in managing mixed data landscapes and locations and it is difficult to know where the data resides, what data is available, as well as how to govern and trust the data source and accuracy, and monitor its usage and lineage across this distributed environment.”
This will change the way information is managed, Tsai added. “Information won’t be tethered to just one system and will flow freely and be connected—no matter how the business needs evolve or where the data consumer is located, or the device they want to use for access.” Enterprises will approach information orchestration from raw feeds with intelligence and real-time analysis on vast quantities and varieties of data types, he said. This will “make it much easier to enrich the mission-critical information with the new sources. Applications and data platform technologies are, and will continuously get infused with, intelligent technologies so business scenarios can be automated by AI and heuristic usage data, creating a new class of solutions.”
DATA GETS EVEN MORE STRATEGIC
In the year ahead, data managers will continue seeing their mandates extend well beyond their original course of action for managing and securing day-to-day transactions.
