2024 PRIORITIES AND OPPORTUNITIES
Given the digital and data transformation that is underway at many organizations, “2024 is proving to be a promising year for data-driven enterprises to evolve and capitalize on the opportunities at hand,” said DeSimone. “They need to prioritize skills growth and data-centric operations, leave behind outdated and inefficient practices and disciplines, and take advantage of the forward-thinking and fast-paced environment to leverage new and cutting-edge practices.”
The growing movement toward data democratization could finally mean the dismantling of the data silos that have cursed integration efforts for decades.
“Data democratization will allow more individuals, across various departments and with varying degrees of technical skills, to have access—at last—to the data they need to succeed,” Golombek predicted.
Two converging trends we’ll see more of over the coming year—open ecosystems and composability—also promise to expand the potential of data. “Open ecosystems are an efficient, modular way of managing your data-driven business operations by using APIs to access and unify data across an organization or between multiple organizations,” Waid explained. “Composability helps organizations think in digital terms, which delivers numerous benefits. Business users, data scientists, and technical integrators can work collaboratively to drive deeper insights across the organization’s operations and customer data.”
AI will also prove to be an enterprise’s best weapon against cyberattacks. “AI will be increasingly used to thwart ransomware attacks,” McGann predicted. “Thresholds can be fooled. Signatures can be changed. But using AI to look for how ransomware changes data will provide valuable insight into whether an organization’s data is clean or infected with ransomware. Solutions that can provide this kind of insight will proliferate and empower a timely recovery by being able to restore pre-infiltration data.”
AI will need to be integrated into cybersecurity defenses within storage systems as well, Brand said. “By employing machine learning, these systems can proactively detect and neutralize cyberthreats in real time, shifting from a reactive to a proactive defense strategy. This approach not only strengthens protection against sophisticated attacks like ransomware but also streamlines incident response, offering a much-needed layer of security in the fight to safeguard digital assets and infrastructure.”
Generative and other AI techniques will even prove to be an effective tool for managing AI itself. “It can be used to create swathes of synthetic data in context, which can be used for a wide range of use cases, such as testing new models, data products, and algorithms,” Varshney said. “There are huge opportunities to advance and expedite predictive analytics models, and even the overall governance of a dataset can be improved because the technology can understand exactly how the data is being used, by who, and when, and suggest policy enhancements.”