The Big Data market for both technology and services is a multi-billion dollar worldwide opportunity and continues to expand rapidly. A recent IDC forecast estimates that the Big Data market will grow nearly 27% annually to over $32 billion by 2017. This represents about six times the growth rate of the overall information technology market.
The adoption rates are growing and the importance of Big Data in business has also increased, so what can we expect to see in 2015? {cartoon courtesy D. Fletcher}
No Single Point of Ownership
Data will become a commodity that is not just kept in one department alone and used purely by senior management. This year we can expect to see a democratization of data throughout organizations, which will mean that more departments will become adept at using the insight this data provides. Rather than working towards a central data management strategy, day-to-day activities will be based on data and the insights it offers.
Non-Data Scientists
The data driven nature of business makes it necessary to find quality talent which can be difficult. As a result, many companies are often reliant on either too few staff or outsourced consultants. We can expect to see a shift towards more automated platforms that can allow employees who may not have as much skill with data as others, to collect, analyze and make decisions based on this data. In other words, we will see a shift to less skilled (non data scientist types). These user interfaces will evolve and become more sophisticated to allow a broader ranger of less skilled employees to manage them.
More Sensor Driven Data
The internet of things is evolving and gaining adoption {see our previous blog post}. This means that we can expect to see much more sensor-to-sensor data being collected, collated and analyzed. This can be done in multiple ways from the way that objects are interacting with another object, to the settings that people are using on particular devices.
Sensor based data is unlikely to outperform transactional data which currently makes up the majority of data collection but is still likely to see a marked increase. It is likely that we are going to see more device-to-device data being created and collected in 2015, and we can see this number grow beyond transactional data within the next few years.
More In-Depth Customer Insights
Despite the fact that transactional data is still more numerous than sensor based data, 2015 may be the year that we see it being truly looked at in multi-dimensional ways to create even deeper customer insight. This could be anything from geographical data to a deeper understanding of purchasing trends according to different, oblique factors. With new technology allowing metrics to be tracked across even more areas and wearables creating even more possible trackable actions, deeper customer understanding is inevitable.
Dramatically Improved Network Security
Big Data analytics will emerge to become a powerful complement to traditional security software. The increased complexity, variety and volume of data that enterprises need to manage make it nearly impossible to analyze everything. This is further exacerbated by the fact that most security platforms don’t even talk to each other, and the cost of processing huge volumes and typesof data is time prohibitive and very costly. By performing in-depth analysis of this data, businesses will be able to identify suspicious behaviours and patterns that might indicate a network is under attack. We expect this trend to accelerate and expand in 2015.
The infographic {below} illustrates some of the key trends in Big Data and Analytics that we can expect to see this year.
Credit: The above infographic was sourced from Aureus Analytics: http://blog.aureusanalytics.com/infographic-big-data-analytics-trends-2015/