Diving into the decade: predicting top tech trends

By Rob Mellor, vice president and general manager EMEA, WhereScape.

  • Saturday, 25th April 2020 Posted 4 years ago in by Phil Alsop

Over the past decade, we have seen technologies such as IoT, automation and cloud computing emerge and take the world by storm. While each of these technologies are different and come with a multitude of benefits, they are all considered some of the most helpful tools to businesses in the modern age.

 

As the industry looks ahead in 2020, many IT teams have wondered, “What’s next in tech innovation?” Below are some reflections on the evolution of technology over the past decade and predictions on what’s next for IT teams in the coming years.

 

Extracting Value from IoT

 

2020 will be the year that Gartner famously predicted the figure of 20 billion internet of things devices online. The challenge with utilizing these devices is no longer in the tech, but in the value organizations can extract from the data they collect. As the number of these devices ramps up, IT teams are finding themselves frantically looking for ways to incorporate these new data sources into existing analytics environments and make insights quickly and easily accessible to the business.

 

The only realistic solution is to embrace automation to ingest, transform and deliver real-time data and insight in a way that the business can use. Data automation can ensure that IT teams, whether old or new, can absorb the ever-growing astronomical volume of data today and be in a position to leverage its insights quickly.

 

Utilizing Automation to Unlock Time to Value

 

One of the trends we’ve seen in the past few years is how businesses are prioritizing time to value. This has spilled over into how organizations are approaching the way they leverage data. Further eliminating the manual, repetitive elements within the development process will be even more of a priority this year.

 

As the speed of business continues to increase, organizations must shorten the time it takes to unlock the value of data. Automation does just that, and additionally enables companies to redeploy valuable developer resources away from routine data infrastructure management processes and onto value-add tasks, such as delivering new solutions and services that will better guide the business.

 

Speeding Up the Cloud Migration Process with Automation

 

Cloud-first is the new norm. As businesses modernize their data infrastructure to keep up the cloud-first mindset, we’ll also see a move to being automation-first – making automation of data ingestion and processing a standard part of any cloud migration effort.

 

Adopting the cloud can be challenging, and companies making this transition will not only be evolving how they work to best leverage the cloud, they will also be navigating working within an infrastructure where the data resides both on-premises and in different cloud environments. Companies will need to become more agile in how they execute a multi-cloud strategy, so we will see increasingly rapid adoption and development of new cloud environments, powered by automation.

 

IoT, cloud and automation technologies have brought their own unique attributes to IT teams over the past decade. Even without a crystal ball, it’s clear to see data automation will continue to forge new avenues and opportunities for IT teams to help their organizations more quickly succeed through data.