The past 2015 was a year marked by profound global changes at the technological level and by the investment that companies have made, aimed above all at digital transformation. Specifically, Big Data has been one of the paradigms that has become more important in most business sectors, allowing the management and analysis of huge amounts of data as never before raised. In this article we will talk precisely about the Big Data challenges for 2016, In other words, the main areas where companies and administrations will be focusing their attention in the coming months.
Before we start, we should take into account how consumer habits have changed over the past year. The fact is that 2015 was a record-breaking year: it was the first time that the mobile devices became the most widely used media for users to connect to the Internet, thus displacing the typical desktop computers. With this change, we can understand why it is becoming increasingly important for companies to manage the volume of data they collect from mobile devices and other channels, such as the information emanating from the so-called Internet of Things, as we will see below.
Internet of Things and the future of Big Data
Early last year, IBM announced that it would invest $3 billion in developing technologies based on the Internet of Things in the next 4 years. And, precisely, the key to the development of the IoT industry is the ability to analyze the huge amounts of data generated by connected devices.
Companies are starting to become aware: Most of them already see IoT as an opportunity to reach consumers more easily and learn from them in order to offer them a tailored service. Without going any further, Computing Research published last 2015 on the Big Data market revealed that the number of companies “not planning to integrate Big Data and analytics” into their operations went from 33% to 16% in just one year. Also, 76% of the senior managers interviewed by the report's authors said that their companies were focused on analyzing their own company's internal and operational data rather than looking at external data, indicating a growing interest in using Big Data for business management.
Security Breaches in Big Data
The U.S. government began 2015 by announcing that the data of some 4 million of its employees had been stolen from the Office Personnel Management, a public agency in charge of managing pensions and other civilian affairs. This incident denotes the profound problem posed by the large-scale security breaches, The number of data sets, which have been increasing as the data are digitized, has increased.
As we have already mentioned in another article in this blog, In the last few years, concern about the security of the information contained in cell phones and wearables has been on the rise in most companies. A report by the consulting firm PwC shows that 86% of those surveyed are concerned about the security of information contained in mobile phones and wearables. security loopholes of information flowing through connected devices.
The new Machine Learning paradigm
If before we talked about the information provided by connected devices, now we focus on a new way of predicting patterns thanks to the huge amount of data generated on the Internet. Thanks to the Machine Learning, We can make very accurate predictions on any subject, from filtering e-mails according to their content to detecting possible failures in a system.
The name Machine Learning refers to computers that apply statistical learning techniques to automatically identify the most important patterns in the data flows. If companies are able to design algorithms that analyze information and solve a question instantly, Big Data will become more important than we could imagine. The key is in decision making, since Machine Learning is not an automated 100% system and requires a capacity for resolution and strategy for the process to be successful.
A new concept: Big Data-As-A-Service
Although the term Big Data-AS-A-Service (or BDaaS) is new and there are not yet many companies familiar with it, it describes a new and growing market. In recent years many companies have spent a lot of effort in offering Cloud-based Big Data solutions to help other companies and organizations with their data management problems. If there is already software as a service, platform as a service and data as a service, it is only natural that the next step is to mix these services in a massive way to improve the volume of data involved.
Applied to business, Big Data is based on knowing what to do with the information provided by the data once it has been analyzed. BDaas enables companies to outsource a wide variety of Big Data functions and pay only for the capacity they need. This new technology solution eliminates the huge costs that are usually associated with these services and allows companies to focus on how they will use that data as a business model. And when it comes to data security, BDaaS providers have a good strategy in place and collaborate with security experts.
Big Data-As-A-Service is not to be taken lightly, as according to experts it will be the key to innovation: According to Forbes, while the Big Data market will grow by $88 billion, the BDaaS market could grow to $30 billion in the coming months.
New Data Privacy Laws in Europe
In the coming months, the European Commission plans to unify data protection within all countries of the Union under a single law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The reason for the reform is that the Commission considers that the current data protection law does not give importance to aspects such as social networks or cloud computing.
This new regulation will put stricter rules in place to determine what companies will be able to do with personal data, which will apply to all companies operating in the European Union or collecting data from European citizens, regardless of the country where they are based.
In addition to what we have already explained, this new regulation will also stipulate that companies will only be able to collect personal data with the express permission of the persons to whom they belong, and may be used only for the specific purpose for which their owner has given permission.
Consequently, methods that encourage users to hand over their personal data, as is the case with some online forms, will be outlawed. It should be noted that the Commission intends to enforce this new legislation with an iron fist: Companies that violate this ban will face the following penalties fines of up to 4% of its global revenues.
At the moment it is only a draft, and all the amendments that have been proposed will have to be analyzed before it enters into force in early 2017. If the law were to be approved as it is currently drafted, many companies would have to rethink the way in which they collect user data in order to comply with the regulations. It will not only be a question of knowing how to manage Big Data, but also how to do so. without violating data protection laws.