Intelligent Data Centres Issue 11 | Page 38

FEATURE US$1.3 trillion was spent on Digital Transformation last year, but it’s estimated 70% of those investments went to waste. Steve Wood, Chief Product Officer, Boomi, Steve Wood, Chief Product a Dell Technologies Officer, Boomi, business a Dell Technologies business Moving every application and dataset into the cloud or applying serverless computing to every workload isn’t always the best move – and I anticipate we’ll see businesses finally applying lessons learned from their over eagerness in 2020. It’s not fiscally responsible to incorporate every last tech trend; none of them are magic bullets to Digital Transformation. Businesses are going to have to be more strategic, customising their plans to their business objectives and culture, and placing emphasis on accelerated time to value over long-term, moonshot ideas. Digital Transformation strategies for the cloud will pull an about- face to hybrid IT environment Companies that rushed to move all their business processes to the cloud are now finding it more expensive or cumbersome than anticipated. Over the next year, we’re going to see many businesses return to the hybrid model. Despite cloud computing’s recent leaps and bounds, it still can’t do everything on-prem can, creating breakpoints across environments. COMPANIES THAT RUSHED TO MOVE ALL THEIR BUSINESS PROCESSES TO THE CLOUD ARE NOW FINDING IT MORE EXPENSIVE OR CUMBERSOME THAN ANTICIPATED. 38 Issue 11 Is iPaaS a thing of the past? The future of data integration in 2020 and beyond The term iPaaS (integration platform as a service) first came around when we announced AtomSphere in 2008. Now, as we enter 2020, I believe we’ll see a shift in this area as the market consolidates and continues to commoditise – Gartner predicts that by 2023, up to two-thirds of existing iPaaS vendors will merge, be acquired or exit the market. Within the next year, I believe there will be a new category/term used to define the unification of applications, people, processes, systems and devices: data unification platform. How organisations are dealing with their data isn’t going to cut it in 2020 – companies need an integration strategy Global data regulations, combined with data silos will have organisations scrambling to rethink their data management strategies in 2020 and look towards data integration – or risk getting left behind. Savvy businesses are now turning towards this to glean more accurate and robust insights, streamline operations and improve business outcomes. This new strategy reduces the time and resources required to constantly reroute data to THE MAMMOTH SURGE OF DATA VOLUME AND THE NEW WAYS TO CREATE AND CONNECT THIS DATA WILL MAKE IMPLEMENTING EFFECTIVE CYBERDEFENCES FROM EVERY ANGLE A MUCH BIGGER TASK. one place. As companies put dollars and resources behind Edge Computing and IoT next year as well, updating their data strategy is critical so they don’t risk losing out on the benefits of next-gen technologies or fall behind competitors. Companies will rely more on metadata than data to provide insights Overzealous data analyses have brought many companies face to face with privacy lawsuits from consumers and governments alike, which in turn has led to even stricter data governance laws. Understandably concerned about making similar mistakes, businesses will begin turning to metadata for insights in 2020, rather than analysing actual data. By harvesting data’s attributes – including its movement, volume, naming conventions and other properties – companies will give indications of concerns around accessing PII and other sensitive information. Metadata lends itself well to data privacy and with the correct Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence modelling, can still provide critical information to the C-suite such as lead generation changes, third-party data access, potential breaches and more. ◊ www.intelligentdatacentres.com