Five Data Management Trends for 2013

Another year has come to an end and it’s interesting to hear all the various 2013 predictions.  Being around for a while I love the technology predictions but I haven’t seen one on data management trends so here is one for everyone to compare their own thoughts against.  Please send me an email with your thoughts or add your comments to the blog as I am opening the comments section for this entry for the next week.

1)    Big data will get bigger.
As more sensors, switches, monitoring devices, and gadgets are bought, the need to organize the big data they produce will continue to grow.  IT management will continue to try, and will have some success getting, a competitive advantage by using analytics against these large data stores.  Just the growth of smart phones worldwide (detailed in this digital buzz blog article) will increase big data that’s driven by mobile/social/sensors..  Just remember big data does not necessarily drive big understanding or big information.

2)    Cloud will continue to grow but pose major data management issues.
Just as other past trends led to more complex systems and applications, the management by magazine CEOs and CIOs will drive the cloud adoption.  The cloud will be a huge component of future system designs and will lead to new reliability, availability and scalability performance issues.  The cloud, right or wrong, with its abundant elastic capacity will be the answer to all new system development.  Since management has no desire to expand personnel and capital intensive IT budgets, the new messy cloud programming syntax, technology, languages and interfaces for the deployment to the cloud will be the answer.  Unfortunately, just as Amazon/Netflix scrooged my holiday, the cloud outage issues will continue, get more frequent and cost businesses huge dollars.  What will be the impact of the first cloud data loss?  It is always easier to leverage and outsource to a vendor and the cloud will continue its growth along with its issues of security, performance, interoperability in private, public or hybrid cloud solutions.   Is your own private cloud where you can control all the issues a better solution?

3)    Security, governance and censorship issues will get bigger.
As big data gets bigger, the security, governance and censorship issues will grow along with it.  These traditional issues only get more complex as the interfaces, devices/sensors and users produce more data and create more usage categories for sharing situations.  Security and governance agreements get more complex and confusing as even Facebook’s founder’s sister, Randi Zuckerberg got tripped up by the complex sharing settings.  Also as governments, corporations and tyrants around the world continue to try to filter, censor and manipulate the web security, governance and censorship will require the world to examine freedom of speech for the web.

4)    Unstructured data gets bigger.
As more sensors, switches, monitoring devices and gadgets bring on big data they also bring new unstructured data.  With applications that need to run on any type of device, applications for phone, tablet and/or PC proliferate; audio, video and other types of unstructured data are becoming more integrated into the business and your databases.  Speech and hand motions are now inputs and will need to be captured.  Speech will finally become a commonly used interface as my iPhone Siri handles quick emails and texts for me and speech is expanded in future applications.  Handling these unstructured data types requires new data management strategies and designs for your systems to incorporate them more in the next year and in future systems.

5)    Software as a platform grows.  
iOS, Windows, UNIX and mainframe computing are no longer the platform.  Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Google (android) are the new platforms for new business applications.  As these platforms or walled gardens offer interaction with hundreds of millions or billions of potential customers, more applications and interfaces will be written and cater to them as a platform.  Software as a service is common and these new software platforms will provide interfaces to entice, enrich and enhance both your business and your competitor’s.

So these are a quick five trends for data management in 2013.  Let me know what you think.

Happy New Year!

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Dave Beulke is an internationally recognized DB2 consultant, DB2 trainer and education instructor.  Dave helps his clients improve their strategic direction, dramatically improve DB2 performance and reduce their CPU demand saving millions in their systems, databases and application areas within their mainframe, UNIX and Windows environments.

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