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With 2018 just barely started, the tech industry is expected to continue to grow, change and transform at the rapid rate we have seen in the last few years. New technologies to tackle the ever-increasing volume and complexity of data will continue to provide more opportunity for organizations to leverage data-backed insights to guide businesses to better performance.
As we move into the new year, here are four tech predictions to keep in mind when planning throughout 2018.
- Cloud-first Will Become the Norm
More companies are already looking to the Cloud as the preferred architecture for their data environment, and 2018 will be a tipping point for adoption. Cloud-first will likely become the norm and even large enterprises will fully embrace this stance.
The biggest challenge for companies making this transition will be how to embrace the period during which they have data both on-premises and in the Cloud. We’re already working with companies to develop and operate automated and efficient hybrid data environments and expect to see this number increase dramatically in the next year.
- Continued Expansion of IoT Capabilities
In 2018, the number of companies harnessing IoT capabilities in the field will continue to expand rapidly due to technological advancements that have been made with sensors and the value being realized through the data they collect. The blessing, and possibly the curse, of the staggering rate that companies are deploying IoT sensors is the vast amounts of data that is produced when tracking things in real-time. Additionally, the added complexity of combining this vast data, coming into the organization in a wide variety of forms, to be of value for analytics.
Next year companies will continue to grapple with the desire to collect data from sensors in the field and understand how to best put that data to good use. To capitalize on this, companies need to implement technology that can handle the constant stream of data in addition to looking at more effective ways to analyze the data, such as machine-learning and deep-learning in order to get actionable insight.
- Only Well-Managed Data Lakes Will Survive
Data Lakes are not a new concept, but with increased data collection and the need to store all of this raw data, they are becoming more crucial to the success of the data-driven business. 2018 is likely to be the year that companies start to understand what ‘schema-on-use’ really means and its associated impact on formalized ‘Data Quality’ programs and practices. Only a well-managed Data Lake will be successful – the rest will wither and die.
If established correctly a Data Lake can take all of the data and information that has been siloed throughout an organization and store it in a dynamic, unstructured repository that enables flexibility and rapid change as it paves the way for Self-Service Analytics in the future.
- Data Warehouses Will Advance
For many businesses, realizing the potential of the Data Warehouse has always seemed ‘just around the corner.’ We have been talking about the promise of Data Warehouses for years, but 2018 will see the technology finally align with the needs of the business and, as a result, the value that Data Warehouses can deliver will begin to be realized. Advancements in automation, Cloud and DevOps will transform how Data Warehouses are designed, developed, deployed and operated, enabling businesses to transform the way that they work with data during the next 12 months.
2018 will see a growing shift toward incorporating new data platforms along with the traditional relational database to better leverage a wider array of processing capabilities and offer a more diverse information environment with the flexibility and scalability to grow with a business. Automation will be critical to the development and ongoing evolution of that environment.