Three Highly Disruptive Big Data Trends to Monitor in 2019

By Alex Bordei

Big data has become mainstream. Companies that do not make use of big data technologies become obsolete in more and more industries. This trend will become increasingly apparent. IoT devices, digitizing dark data, and many other trends are in store for 2019.

IoT Devices and 5G

This is no mistake that I link IoT devices to 5G technologies. The bandwidth provided by 5G will increase the adoption of IoT devices and sensors for both industry and consumers, enabling real-time predictive reporting and analysis for home and industrial use.

There are infinite use cases one can think of, from self-replenishing refrigerators in-home use to predictive maintenance for expensive industrial machinery that incurs great productivity loss if it breaks down. This is growing to become a norm, because of the competitive advantage it grants to companies that adopt such technologies.

The IT backbone of IoT and 5G is big data with machine learning / deep learning. All the data is stored in the cloud for fast, secure and real-time processing.

Dark Data

Dark data is analogic data and any other type of data that has not been digitized and stored online. It is called dark because through a big data perspective it is useless and cannot be turned into useful insight.

Companies begin to digitize their data because of the realization of the goldmine they sit on. There are hundreds-of-year-old companies that sit on important historical data.

Benefits of digitizing dark data:

• Security: Offline data can be destroyed in fires, thrown out by mistake or become decrepit. By securing it in a cloud that is backed on multiple servers in different locations, that data is not easily lost.
• Storage Space: This historical data occupies space. A lot of space. By digitizing it, you save rent by emptying storage or at least provide a tidier work environment when talking about smaller companies.
• Insight: Extracting useful insight from offline data is hard and cannot be correlated with the new data that is gathered. By digitizing data, you have all your data in one place and, through an API call, you can process it and then extract the insights you require.

There is no need to clutter your business with data that is quite useless unless it provides insight. This trend will grow in 2019 as it is only rational that businesses begin to forage their dark data.

Support and Chatbots

Chatbots are gradually taking the place of humans in basic support, in replying on social media or even providing useful news and updates. The bots keep improving, and yes, I still miss the human interaction in support at times, but this trend will not stop. The bots will improve to a point where humans performing such mundane tasks are not required anymore.

Companies save money, and people will take on more creative activities than explaining to you how to set your iPhone on airplane mode. Yes, humans can achieve more than that, so no one will miss such jobs, while the companies save money and become more efficient.

Wait, there’s more!

Other big data uses, trends, and technologies are on the rise, from gig economies to decentralized platforms. The whole of humanity will most likely board this trend at some point, because of the multiple use cases in medicine, industry, IT, and even politics and music.

Alex Bordei is Director of Product and Development at Bigstep, a company that empowers organizations determined to make sense of their data by providing a full-stack big data ecosystem running in a high-performance bare metal cloud. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or follow on Twitter.