More analytics, for example, is being supported within mobile apps. Some of the leading BI and analytics solutions vendors now offer mobile apps that offer dashboards—often configurable—that provide insight and visibility into operational trends to decision makers who are outside of their offices. While industry watchers have been predicting the “democratization” of data analytics across enterprises for years, the arrival of mobile apps as front end clients to BI and analytics systems may be the ultimate gateway to easy-to-use analytics across the enterprise. By their very nature, mobiles apps need to be designed to be as simple and easy to use as possible. Over the coming year, mobile app access to key data-driven applications will become part of every enterprise.
The ability to access data from any and all devices, of course, will increase security concerns. While many enterprises have tacitly approved the “bring your own device” (BYOD) trend in recent years, some are looking to move to corporate-issued devices that will help lock down sensitive data. The coming year will see increased efforts to better ensure the security of data being sent to mobile devices.
7-Storage Enters the Limelight
Storage has always been an unappreciated field of endeavor. It has been almost an afterthought, seen in disk drives and disk arrays running somewhere in the back of data centers. This is changing rapidly, as enterprises recognize that storage is shaping their infrastructures’ capabilities. There’s no question that many organizations are dealing with rapidly expanding data stores. Much of today’s data growth—coming out of enterprise applications—is being exacerbated by greater volumes of unstructured, social media and machine-generated data making their way into the business analytics platform. Many enterprises are also evolving their data assets into “data lakes,” in which enterprise data is stored up front in its raw form and accessed when needed, versus being loaded into purpose-built, siloed data environments.
The question becomes, then, where and how to store all this data. The storage approach that has worked well for organizations over the decades—produce data within a transaction system, then send it downstream to a disk, and ultimately, a tape system—is being overwhelmed by today’s data demands. Not only is the amount of data rapidly growing, but more users are demanding greater and more immediate access to data, even when it may be several weeks, months, or years old.
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Over the coming year, there will be a push by enterprises to manage storage “smartly”—versus simply adding more disk capacity to existing systems or purchasing new systems from year to year. A recent survey by Unisphere Research finds growing impetus toward smarter storage solutions, which include increased storage efficiency through data compression, information lifecycle management and consolidation, or deployment strategies such as tiered storage. At the same time, storage expenditures keep rising—eating a significant share of IT budgets and impeding other IT initiatives. For those with significant storage issues, the share storage takes out of IT budgets is even greater (“Managing Exploding Data Growth in the Enterprise: 2014 IOUG Database Storage Survey,” May 2014).
What’s Ahead in 2015
The year 2015 represents new opportunities to expand and enlighten data management practices and platforms to meet the needs of the ever-expanding digital enterprise. To be successful, digital business efforts need to have solid data management practices underneath.As enterprises go digital, they will be relying on well-managed and diverse data to explore and reach new markets.