IDC reports that the data analytics market is growing, with $200 billion in spending each year, propelling digital transformation initiatives forward.
What’s causing this exponential growth in data management? Findings from Gartner show that 90% of businesses consider information to be a valuable asset that provides a competitive edge. This attitude is both shaping and being shaped by some important trends:
Management Solutions
As cloud opportunities have grown in recent years, many companies are faced with a dilemma: do they accept the management complexity of hybrid or multi-cloud in order to gain the benefits that cloud solutions introduce? Companies that adopted cloud technologies often watched their cost savings melt away in the form of management complexity.
New hybrid, multi-cloud, and intercloud management solutions have allowed for heightened visibility and control, cost management, and workload allocation benefits that allow companies to access the data they need – and place that data where it makes the most sense.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way data is computed, stored, and processed, with streamlined functions that allow it to be more easily applied, analyzed, and accessed. AI can be used to establish baselines for a wide variety of business applications, then spot anomalies and generate automated responses to those anomalies, whether it is an indication of a breach of security or a customer that is buying more of a particular product line.
Data Fabric
The ways in which data management occurs and how it relates to digital transformation is increasingly related to the quality of a company’s data fabric. This concept embraces centralized access to data that eliminates data silos and encourages the simplification of data management and reduction of data disparity.
Blockchain
Often associated with cryptocurrency, blockchain delivers benefits to all types of data management by offering secure transaction records and audit trails. It stores data in a decentralized way – but also in a way that doesn’t allow any changes to occur because of third-party authority structures. The technology was first introduced related to Bitcoin, but it has far-reaching implications across every industry.
Edge Computing
This approach to IT pulls computing away from a centralized data center and instead moves it closer to where data is generated and accessed. The edge includes not just laptops and branch locations but the entire scope of the internet of things (IoT) and mobile devices. Edge computing offers a variety of benefits, including better application performance, speed, and agility.
When companies take edge computing a step further and employ secure access service edge (SASE) to include software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) and next-generation firewalls, plus zero trust authentication policies, the approach to digital transformation becomes more focused on the edge, allowing for speed and agility without compromising security.
If you’ve been examining your digital transformation strategy and wondering how data management solutions could help propel your company forward, contact us at Independent Connections. We can offer a clear assessment of the specific benefits each of these areas of technology can deliver and help you pursue the right strategy.