Infogix Analyzes Seven Hot Data Trends for 2019

Infogix, a leading provider of data management tools, unveiled its third edition of annual trends in data management that will have major ramifications on businesses in 2019 and beyond.

“One of the most important themes we’re seeing this year is the way enterprises are turning their data into real actionable insights to transform organizational processes and gain a competitive advantage,” said Emily Washington, senior VP of product management at Infogix.

“Businesses of all shapes and sizes are gaining a handle on their data environments through advanced data management technologies. Organizational roles are shifting, and businesses are figuring out new and exciting ways to leverage their data as an enterprise-wide asset.”

Business leaders at Infogix spent the year collecting the findings. The significant new trends for 2019 include:

Shifting job roles thanks to advanced data management technologies
As technological capabilities improve, the value of data lies primarily in the hands of business users, rather than within the confines of the IT department.

More teams within organizations are seeking a unified understanding of their most critical operational and business challenges.

The proliferation of integrated platforms and advancement of data management tools, increasingly empowers data consumers to understand, manage and use data quickly and simply through self-service solutions, allowing IT to focus on higher-value data management projects.

Migration of dark data 
Even with advanced technologies, organizations still have vast amounts of untapped dark data to process and transform into digital assets.

Organizations will digitize and migrate analog databases to leverage cloud-based predictive analytics to strengthen business decisions.

Data deluge is becoming even worse 
Organizations are still challenged by managing the data deluge. Every day more and more data will continue being created and distributed across different processes and systems.

Organizations need centralized data management technologies to manage distributed data environments and deliver business users complete transparency into their data.

Business users today demand a new data experience, one that emulates the “Amazon Marketplace,” so they can easily search, locate, understand and leverage data they can trust.

Data lakes are evolving 
* Support for more than HDFS, i.e. ability to process additional data sources (e.g. S3, …)

* Shift from viewing data as a static resource to data in motion.

* On-premise Hadoop is transitioning to cloud-hosted, driven primarily by both cost and the ability to scale elastically.

Trends from 2018 that will continue into 2019 include:
Increased importance of data governance: The implementation of GDPR in 2018 motivated many businesses to quickly advance their data governance programs. Unfortunately, this newfound focus on data governance didn’t automatically translate to a better understanding of enterprise data and new analytical insights. It did however, successfully cultivate open communication between various lines of business.

As a result, many companies are now ready to expand their data governance program to a more strategic focus beyond just governing data. By introducing governance to analytical models, businesses can aggregate the metadata around their models to ensure all teams have a complete understanding of their data and can leverage it for insights.

Continued rise of Chief Data Officer (CDO) 
Managing data is becoming a team effort. Senior leaders and C-suite executives are working together to develop coordinated strategies and build a data-driven culture.

Whether, CDO, CIO or CTO, leaders understand the need for collaboration to advance innovative technologies and gain a competitive advantage. Organizations who defer to a single person won’t keep pace.

Ensuring data privacy for regulations such as GDPR
The GDPR deadline came and went, and the frenzy is over. Some businesses successfully became compliant, some still struggle and others outside the European Union (EU) decided to abandon the EU for now.

Yet, there are similar regulations on the horizon in Canada and the U.S.

Canada is currently adjusting its data protection law with GDPR’s standards in mind. California passed the Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (AB375). Beginning in 2020, organizations will need to disclose personal information upon a consumer’s request.

Organizations who still aren’t compliant with GDPR processing data for EU residents will need to act quickly to avoid fines and penalties.

“As the data deluge worsens, organizations will find it increasingly difficult to manage and leverage data as an enterprise asset,” said Tim Segall, CTO at Infogix. “The days of IT being solely responsible for data have ended thanks to integrated self-service data management tools that deliver an all-inclusive view of an organization’s data landscape. Complete transparency into an organizations data landscape is crucial for successful analytics projects in 2019.”