Ask an IT professional at any modern enterprise what new phenomenon both fills them with huge anticipation yet makes them quiver with fear, and their answers could be similar.
“How do I manage data? How, oh how…” The two words that can change all our lives for the better if only we figure out how to manage it efficiently: ‘Big Data’, Artyom Astafurov, DataArt senior vice president, IoT/M2M. It sounds like a mythical monster that might be distantly related to the Yeti, doesn’t it?
We are close to tapping into technology that could revolutionise our industry, but are we any closer to making use of it? Big Data has been a recurring theme throughout 2015, raising questions as to whether the current data management platforms possess the required scalability to manage such data.
But steady yourself it’s not all doom and gloom. Hope is on the horizon. The future is bright for us all, as in 2016, I predict that we will witness large-scale developments in IoT and cloud computing. This is the good news for the new year. Greater efficiency will change our lives, as we can now welcome advancements in data management systems to cast away the despair that used to plague the tech industry as a whole.
What sparked this?
The old, simple and forever recurring theme: competition. Major developments in Amazon Web Services (AWS) have led to Amazon’s cloud platform becoming the platform of choice for the majority of enterprises. The benefits of AWS, following their updates, have resulted in more and more enterprises moving aggressively into the public cloud. Other services, seeing these developments are now being forced to up their game. 2016 will see major advancements to countless more data management systems. Music to all of our ears. DeviceHive, for example, is already well positioned to run as an alternative IoT platform to AWS, and don’t expect it to be the only one. 2016 will be a year of competition, throughout which many IoT platforms will be vying for supremacy.
What other platforms can we look forward to?
Platform scalability (the capability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of work), computing and analytics will rise in importance. Data processing engine Apache Spark will continue to lead the way as the best and most popular analytics platform on the market. Along with research and visualisation tools such as Databricks Cloud and Tableau, Apache Spark will revolutionise how companies handle their data.
And it’s set to get even better. Why? Because of the brilliance of Apache Mesos and Containerisation, which will elevate the standard of how systems are deployed and orchestrated. Their platforms provide a robust and scalable environment to run micro-services alongside other work tools such as Apache Spark or HDFS.
So, sit back and relax as your data management worries will soon become a thing of the past. Which is to say they won’t, but they will become easier to handle. Prepare for a brave new world ahead as in 2016 we finally unlock the unimaginable potential of Big Data.
The author of this blog is Artyom Astafurov, DataArt senior vice president, IoT/M2M.
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