31-Dec-2018 01:49 PM
Posted by Prashanth GJ, CEO, Technobind
2018 was a transformative year for the
Indian enterprises in more ways than one. Data was at the centre of our
critical business and technology discussions. Digital businesses mandated new
ways of utilizing data and redefining customer experiences.
We also witnessed relevant conversations
and developments in essential areas such as data protection, security and
analytics.
As we step into 2019, forecasts and market
trends assure us an even more positive and upward path. India’s IT spending is
projected to grow at a healthy 6.7 percent from last year, driven predominantly
by digital business transformation initiatives, Gartner forecasts. That’s more
than double the predicted growth of the global IT spend.
Harnessing the power of data, to achieve
better business results, will continue to be the top priority for organizations
across industries.
Digital transformation and cloud will
certainly bring more data challenges. Nevertheless,
the ‘data-determined’ leaders and organizations will have the tools and
strategy to tackle the changing situations. Here is what we expect to change in
the new year:
Data
protection in multi-cloud
More than 80 percent of organizations today
have a multi-cloud environment, making it a clear reality. A multi-cloud
strategy is inevitable to optimize performance and meet the changing business
objectives. Nevertheless, experts point out that cloud data management and data
protection have to be part of the strategy to generate actual results.
Imagine IT professionals opening up a
backup product, logging into a cloud, performing a task, logging out and then
repeating the process in another cloud with a separate recovery tool!
The ability to support multiple clouds will
greatly influence organization’s data protection buying decisions. Businesses
will look for solutions with a single pane of glass to move, manage and use data
across clouds and on-premises
environment.
It will be interesting to see how vendors
that still offer only single cloud support survive in the market in 2019. There
are platforms in the market that already support as much as 40 cloud storage
options. Players who don’t follow the suit may eventually be left out!
Analytics:
More powerful and accessible
Analytics
will offer a completely new way to interact with data in plain language, with
the help of natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning. Information
will no longer be ‘locked down’ and made accessible only to a few experts or
data scientists.
This
means that a sales person can simply type “what were my sales last month?” and
get useful and actionable insights!
In
fact, 2019 will see more and more businesses wanting their employees to use
analytics. As a result, analytics solutions will become more intuitive, easy to use, and bring in powerful, deep analytical capabilities to
the end users.
2019 is expected to be a landmark year for
analytics as the analytics output of business users with self-service
capabilities is predicted to surpass that of professional data scientists this
year. Self-service tools will take up a major share of the $2.03 billion analytics market in India in the
next one year.
AI and ML to go mainstream
AI and
machine learning projects will finally move out of innovation labs and data
science departments, to access business relevant data. AI is predicted to
enhance the entire data life cycle – right from data discovery, backup, restore
and analysis - by automating time consuming manual processes.
AI is
predicted to enable ‘content-aware discovery’ and analysis of critical content
across data sources, whether on-premises or in the cloud or across various
endpoints.
Though
AI has risen to power in the last one year, there were plenty of limitations
for companies in executing end-to-end AI or ML projects. They have been
restricting these projects to a subset or sample data, which drastically
limited the possibilities of the technology. Not just that, moving huge amounts
of data to the AI/ML platform introduced great security risks.
2019
will bring new developments that eliminate these restrictions and unlock the
true potential of AI.