Advancing technology is having impacts on everything it touches and will continue to do so. As always at the heart of the matter is data. It is the star performer resulting in business success, so finding new and innovative ways to keep it there is the goal for IT leaders. The value of data has long been recognized and it is the job of astute businesses to keep ahead of their competitors by anticipating changes that come along. This year the emerging trends that should be noted include: AI and machine learning for looking into data breaches and attacks that require analysis of large amounts of data not easily conducted manually by people. AI provides a valuable insight into the anatomy of a security breach and how the affected parties can react.
Naturally AI ties into automation. RPA (robotic process automation) which tasks robots with processing tasks too mundane and time-consuming for humans enabling them to focus on more innovative or efficiency boosting work. As a logical progression expect to see more initiatives in this arena. Another link is added into the chain via DataOps. This agile approach to data management cultivates practices that improve the speed and accuracy of analytics, including data access, quality control, automation, integration and management. It is likely this cross-functional approach to analytics could be disruptive and represents a high risk high reward move because not many people are using it and those who do gain competitive advantage and a knock on effect on workflow.
As the growth of interconnected devices continues more companies are relying on IoT as a means of boosting business. This has driven advances in edge computing which help transform how data is handled and processed from these many interconnected devices. The real win for edge computing is that it brings data closer to the devices from which it is being gathered removing the lag issues real-time data can suffer from if the central location is far away. The cost savings to businesses are clear especially if they can transmit the minimal amount of data and avoid the huge bandwidth problems multiple devices can bring. If we look at the security implications of edge computing it is clear that data could be at risk especially when different devices are not as secure as a centralized cloud-based system. When advancing on edge it is wise to be aware of this potential issue and to take pre-emptive measures like data encryption or use of correct access-control methods are employed.
As a natural segue, 5G cannot be ignored as the bandwidth savior since it promises to reduce the latency concerns as well as opening up the pipeline. 5G and edge computing are working symbiotically to offer faster real-time processing.