The concept of having access to vast amounts of information began in the early 1940’s when a Wesleyan University Librarian, Fremont Rider, published The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library. He estimated that university libraries were doubling in size every sixteen years. He elaborated by speculating that the Yale Library, in the year 2040, will have approximately 200,000,000 volumes, which will occupy over 6,000 miles of shelves. Today, the focus isn’t on how much data, in aggregate, is available for consumption as much as its focus is on how we can leverage it efficiently to make better decisions about every aspect of our lives and how to effectively manage never-before-seen data volume.
Click here to read an informative article on the history of big data entitled, “A Very Short History of Big Data”. This will give you a nice look into the past before we take you on the adventure that is the future of big data and the many ways it will impact our personal and professional lives.
Just yesterday, Gartner released its top predictions for 2016, with its take on the landscape of the digital future; “an algorithmic and smart machine-driven world where people and machines must define harmonious relationships”.
GARTNER’S PREDICTIONS:
- By 2018, 20 percent of business content will be authored by machines.
- By 2018, six billion connected things will be requesting support.
- By 2020, autonomous software agents outside of human control will participate in five percent of all economic transactions.
- By 2018, more than 3 million workers globally will be supervised by a “robo-boss”.
- By year-end 2018, 20 percent of smart buildings will have suffered from digital vandalism.
- By 2018, 45 percent of the fastest-growing companies will have fewer employees than instances of smart machines.
- By year-end 2018, customer digital assistant will recognize individuals by face and voice across channels and partners.
- By 2018, two million employees will be required to wear health and fitness tracking devices as a condition of employment.
- By 2020, smart agents will facilitate 40 percent of mobile interactions, and the post-app era will begin to dominate.
- Through 2020, 95 percent of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.
We have a wide variety of customers, many of whom are Fortune 500 companies. These global enterprise operations are looking to gain a competitive edge by leveraging big data in new and innovative ways. That’s a pretty big challenge in and of itself. However, one of the oftentimes overlooked challenges that they bring to our attention is how they will manage the data itself.
Sample Questions:
- How will all of this data impact the performance of our applications?
- Is it better to leverage 3rd party APIs to access data and reduce our data footprint or is it better to house it internally so that we have complete control? What are the pros/cons of each approach?
- With this massive amount of data flowing in, what should our data archiving strategy look like?
- What kind of data disposition plan should we put in place?
- Are there any data discipline best practices we should be taking into account on an ongoing basis?
Contact Auritas today to speak with one of our big data experts. We’d be happy to speak with you about the challenges your company faces as it relates to big data, or any other data challenge for that matter
To read more details about Gartner’s predictions, please click here to view their full release.