It seems big data is in the news every day. Whether it’s about NSA fighting terrorism, online retailers predicting customers’ buying patterns or scientists forecasting the spread of Ebola, the Big Data landscape is growing through all sectors of the economy. And data streams from most areas of daily life – such as phones, credit cards, televisions, computers – with Amazon, Walmart, Netflix and Google, among others, as massive big data consumers.
Data emerges from the infrastructure of cities, as well – from sensor-equipped buildings, trains, buses, planes, bridges and factories. It’s estimated that 43 trillion gigabytes of new data will be created by the year 2020.
In an interview with the Telegraph’s Sophie Curtis last December, Michael Dell said:
“It used to be PCs and smartphones; now you have tablets and sensors and cars spinning out all kinds of telemetry data, and all kinds of machines and products and services becoming digital products.
Within all of those devices, you have a thousand times more applications, and the data is very rich.
If you look at companies today, most of them are not very good at using the data they have to make better decisions in real time. I think this is where the next trillion dollars comes from for our customers and for our industry.”
Here are upcoming effects of big data on business.
Gartner says through 2020 the smart machine era will blossom with a proliferation of contextually aware, intelligent personal assistants, smart advisors (such as IBM Watson), advanced global industrial systems and public availability of early examples of autonomous vehicles.
New systems that begin to fulfil some of the earliest visions for what information technologies might accomplish — doing what we thought only people could do and machines could not —are now emerging. Businesses expect individuals will invest in, control and use their own smart machines to become more successful.
Enterprises will similarly invest in smart machines. Consumerization versus central control tensions will not abate in the era of smart-machine-driven disruption. If anything, smart machines will strengthen the forces of Consumerization after the first surge of enterprise buying commences.
If wondering about the significance of mobile and its rapid growth, you should take a look at this year’s holiday sales from Amazon, which reported an impressive turnout. Almost 70 percent of holiday customers shopped via mobile devices. 80 percent of internet users own a smartphone. According to eMarketer, mobile is expected to grab 62.6 percent of digital ad spend in 2016.
The most important reasons for not moving to the public cloud are performance and security. It is amply clear that you can do security better in the cloud than in the data center, and now it’s more visible and happens to be true with application performance. You have no valid reason to avoid migrating to the cloud. Cloud provides a ubiquitous, on-demand, broad network with elastic resource pooling. It’s a self-configurable, cost-effective computing and measured service.
On the application side, cloud computing helps in adopting new capabilities, meeting the costs to deploy, employing viable software, and maintaining and training people on enterprise software. If enterprises want to keep pace, they need to emulate the architectures, processes and practices of these exemplary cloud providers.
With easy access to cheap cloud services, smarter people came up with these platforms, and it has fundamentally changed businesses and created new ways of working. Mobile cannot be an afterthought.
