Top Big Data Trends to Watch Out for in 2016

Big Data has gained widespread acceptance over the last two years for being one of the major disruptive forces that can transform the way we live and do business. While earlier, only large enterprises were the key takers of Big Data technology, but in 2015 even small and mid-sized companies have started harnessing its power to analyze massive amounts of varied information.

With Big Data, businesses know what regular customers are looking for and which products are selling easily. Big Data is not only helping businesses to track customer information, it’s also helping them in their decision making process. Let’s take a look at the top three Big Data trends which are going to be talked about in 2016.

Importance of mobile security

There is no doubt that mobile devices have quickly become the most ubiquitous device that users need all the time. Within a short span of time, smartphones have gained significant credibility to handle all our daily computing needs. Keeping this in mind, mobile devices will be manufactured with better security standards in 2016 for accessing data repositories.

Business leaders need to pay more attention to security, as large number of employees today brings their own mobile devices into the workplace, and lack of security on those devices can pose serious threat to their business.

Bring your own device (BOYD) is a concept where organizations encourage relevant employees to bring their own mobile devices instead of employers providing them, it is also a concept that encourages employees to use their own devices to access business data or services and make it an extension of office when at home or travelling. BYOD policies can’t be same for every organization, so factors such as how employees should protect their devices, the type of apps that can be used on personal devices etc should be highly considered.

Need for more data scientists

Globally, Big Data is going to be a very big industry in 2016, and there is need for a large number of qualified data scientists to meet the demand. Data Scientists are responsible for manage huge amount of data and analyze it, to ensure that the organization can make the most of it. However, with more and more organizations realizing the importance of Big Data and the need to analyze what they have collected, the demand for qualified data scientists will rise exponentially.

According to a recent study, there is a shortage of 145,000 to 197,000 professionals with analytical expertise in the US. On the other hand, there are around 1.7 million managers and analysts who don’t have the right expertise required to handle huge amount of data and take decisions based on data analysis. 2016 will see a rise in trend where businesses will engage with technology partners, specializing in big data analysis to handle their rising volume of data. 

IoT to take centre stage

It’s predicted that the Internet of Things (IoT) will take centre stage in 2106 and is going to be the next big thing in the technology world. With almost every device getting connected to the internet for creating, sending, or storing data, this year will witness the launch of several new business opportunities and large number of startups.

However, it would be wrong to distinguish between IoT and Big Data, as both can be described as two sides of the same coin. Organisations that really want to leverage these technologies to have a competitive advantage would have to establish a proper analytics platform and infrastructure.

For these trends to show results, the need of the hour is to address the demand for proper infrastructure and analytics platform at this moment. Organizations will have to immediately focus on creating such infrastructure and plan how they want to determine the value of the data being collected.

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