For organisations around the world, data is at the heart of business, and effective data governance is top-priority. For many years, this simply meant collecting, storing, and occasionally accessing data but rapid digitisation is rendering these frameworks obsolete.
The total volume of data collected worldwide is increasing rapidly—and as COVID-19 continues to cause disruption to economies, businesses, and lives, it’s becoming more urgent to not only marvel at the scale of all this data but to understand how to address various data-related challenges.
In a post-pandemic world, businesses must be able to pull critical information from the massive amounts of data being generated, accessed, and stored in multiple locations, and leverage it to drive informed business decisions. They must also remain agile and be able to evolve data strategies in accordance with the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), augmented reality and other emerging technologies.
It’s evident that data analytics is becoming a must-have capability for 2022 and we predict that the following upcoming data strategy trends will only amplify its importance:
Unstructured Data Will Shape Data Management
It’s estimated that “unstructured data represents an astounding 80 to 90% of all new enterprise data, and it’s growing 3x faster than structured data”. However, due to the fact that unstructured data is stored in its native format, it’s taking longer for businesses to understand how to work with it.
Unlocking valuable insights from unstructured data sources, such as email messages, webpages, videos, and audio files, will become paramount to businesses as artificial intelligence and machine learning helps to strengthen unstructured data management capabilities.
Data Fabric Architecture Will Modernise Data Integration
Data fabric architecture provides visibility and accessibility to data across all environments, including hybrid and multi-cloud platforms. It combines traditional data management practises with emerging ones to support business intelligence initiatives and simplifies configuration by automating the placement of data into categories for analysis with minimal human intervention.
Businesses are beginning to identify deployment opportunities for data fabric to reduce human errors and overall costs, and while still early days, 2022 should see data fabric move from “being a vision to a set of architectural principles of data management”.
Multi-Cloud Platforms Will Evolve with Different Data Strategies
According to predictions, “global spending on cloud services is expected to reach over $482 billion in 2022, up from $313 billion in 2020” and more and more organisations will opt for a multi-cloud strategy.
Unlike a hybrid cloud strategy, which is adopted by many organisations today, a multi-cloud environment relies on multiple cloud computing systems to perform tasks, such as data storage and data analytics. A multi-cloud strategy provides businesses with the agility and flexibility to operate applications from anywhere whilst remaining cost efficient.
A Data Management Strategy That Is Right For You
Drowning in a sea of data? Slingshot Simulations can help you to adopt the data management strategy that is right for your business. We employ cutting-edge data science to enable better, more informed decision-making.