big data in digital transformation

The abundance of data availability and increasing complexity create the need for fast analytics to promote fast and sound decision-making. According to IDC, there will be more than 175 zettabytes of data collected by analysts by 2025, and data analytics will be a $49 billion industry. With the increasing adoption of data analytics in the everyday world, tech and non-tech savvy individuals should know the driving forces behind this opportunity. Below are key trends in data analytics you should know.

1. Cloud Migration

Companies and businesses were initially reluctant to migrate their data storage centers to the cloud, especially since the cloud was deemed a better platform for transactional purposes and not memory-reliant analytics. However, this isn’t the case now. Instead, cloud technology is increasingly becoming smarter, swifter, and flexible, explaining why several companies have moved their data warehouses to the cloud or adopted a hybrid model.

The use of initial physical data storage warehouses, such as Oracle Exadata, has significantly declined as more people opt for cloud service providers, such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. What complements this migration is the inception of homomorphic encryption, enabling cloud users to compute tasks without necessarily decrypting them. Obviously, working on data without necessarily decrypting it increases its cloud security.

As you may know, the data security of cloud data was one major obstacle to the adoption of cloud computing. As a result, most companies were reluctant to use cloud data storage due to security risks. Fortunately, homomorphic encryption perfectly solves this problem. That said, Gartner estimates that the adoption of public cloud services will increase to 90% by 2022. Similarly, cloud-based artificial intelligence will increase five times by 2023.

2. Democratization

The initial perception that data science and analytics are a reserve for experts with advanced data science knowledge isn’t true anymore. Currently, everyone can analyze their data with the help of an intelligent data analytics platform. As of now, there is a thin line between IT departments and other departments. Data isn’t for the sole purview of IT or analytics teams anymore.

In the current age of data empowerment, more efforts are directed toward seamless integration of data platforms, such as providing visualization boards in an enterprise. There is also an expected increase in the self-service analytics software business, as everyone collects and analyzes their data.

Data is increasingly becoming democratic, as organizations allow employees of various levels to access, explore, and analyze data from their handheld devices or desktops. In addition, advancing technologies, including the introduction of business intelligence models, have empowered employees to identify data patterns, understand contexts and collaborate with other members to derive the most from the provided insights.

3. Faster and Scalable AI, ML, and NLP

Another predictable data analytics trend has to do with the automation of data classification and data modeling. Automating data classification and modeling will lead to more accurate and actionable data insights, which are overly beneficial for any business. Companies or businesses that pick up market trends before others will definitely stay ahead of others.

Natural language processing has made data analysis easy by providing effective language queries. This is beneficial for businesses that want to extract actionable insights from large chunks of unstructured data collected from various sources, including social media and online reviews. It is through NLP that computers can easily understand human language, such as customer conversations.

4. Data as a Core Business Function

As mentioned, most businesses were hesitant to embrace the importance of data analytics. However, business leaders have discovered the benefits of using data analytics in accelerating business initiatives. Therefore, instead of using it as a second alternative, data analytics is slowly becoming a core function. The only challenge is that business leaders underestimate the complexity of data analytics and often end up missing many opportunities.

5. Increased Adoption of Customer Data Platforms

Increased digitization in 2020, majorly due to the raging Coronavirus pandemic, saw increased demand in customer data platforms. Just to mention, a customer data platform is a sophisticated data hub where everything that relates to data, including customer information, converges. Customers leave a lot of data that businesses should track when interacting with brands, surfing the internet, or interacting using offline and online channels.

Customer data platforms provide a 360-degree view of the customer journey and capture all interactions with brands. It also updates the business database as new data from various channels is generated. That said, the popularity of CDP is poised to increase this year and beyond. That aside, contrary to the opinion that CDPs will only benefit B2C businesses, B2B companies will benefit as well, especially as businesses shifted to online transactions.

Bottom Line

Advancing technology and the recent pandemic accelerated digitization and made it a new norm for most businesses. Unlike before, data is currently a key ally for most businesses. Therefore, current trends will be aimed at using data analytics to complement industry needs. That said, contact Sisu Data to leverage this unbowed trend.