3 Data Integration, Management and Architecture Trends for 2019
The coming year almost certainly has some surprises in store for the technology space, but one factor IT professionals can bank on is that digital transformation will remain a top goal for enterprises. Digital transformation provides a solid advantage by facilitating operational excellence; it enables service or product innovation, and it increases customer value over time. That’s why enabling digital transformation is among CIOs’ top three objectives in 11 out of 15 industries, according to Gartner’s 2018 CIO Agenda Industry Insights report.
Both the agent and currency of every digital transformation initiative is data. IT professionals seeking to help their companies pursue digital business models in the coming year must be ready to quickly integrate an ever-increasing number of endpoints and applications required by business leaders. They must also be ready to manage and deploy digital assets and data from new data sources, a majority of which will be cloud-based, and do so at the speed of innovation. For IT leaders, the challenge will be to develop an IT strategy and architecture that can support the integration and data management needs of digital transformation.
As IT leaders make key architectural decisions, three data integration, management and architecture trends will bear watching. These trends will form crucial inflection points for companies pursuing digital transformation in 2019 and beyond. Here’s a brief look at each:
DIY – time to call in the experts:
IT leaders have discovered that aging systems that require IT professionals to connect data endpoints can’t keep up with increasingly complex data needs and business requirements to quickly incorporate applications. The pressure will only grow as companies implement digital business models. Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) is a newer approach that facilitates more agile integration, including cloud-based applications. As currently characterized by industry insiders, iPaaS provides a modern architecture for integration and data management, but it also equips business leaders and citizen integrators with DIY tools to complete own integrations.
But is DIY the right approach, given the increasing data integration and management complexity driven by digital transformation, which involves more sources and greater more data compliance and security considerations?
Many IT leaders are opting instead for an iPaaS model with an advanced architecture that also offers managed services to address the complexity of integration, security, compliance, etc. It’s a logical progression. Homeowners routinely tackle simple home repair and maintenance tasks themselves but call in the professionals when facing more complex jobs. The same is true of enterprises that initially took a DIY approach to data integration; as the compliance, security, infrastructure and operational challenges associated with the function got more complex (and consumed an increasing share of scarce IT resources), they called in the professionals, i.e., turned to managed services providers so they could refocus on their core competencies.
Industry giants seek consolidation: Seasoned IT pros may remember the go-to-market plan followed by big companies like Oracle and SAP a generation ago.
