The Davos World Economic Forum has kicked off for 2023. The key insight we took away? Katherine Garrett-Cox, CEO, GIB Asset Management with Gulf International Bank stated, “We must live in a world where mandatory reporting will become more relevant. It isn’t enough to be voluntary and hope no-one calls you out. Investors will look to the data because disclosure drives insight and insight drives action – and action is what investors want to see on the ground.”
Digital transformation cannot happen without data management. However, modern data management is an evolving field with so much AI becoming mainstream in data management technologies. Here are some new trends that can shape the data management landscape in 2023.
Data management SaaS (software as a service)
As leaders such as Informatica are moving their products to the cloud, the “low-code no-code” mindset is becoming a theme to build robust code that can automate, streamline, enhance, and systemize data management tasks and responsibilities. In addition, due to the nature of it being fully managed by the vendor, the monitoring, updates, and downtime become significantly easier than its on-premise counterpart.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI and ML)
Gartner predicted that machine learning will be the fastest growing field in artificial intelligence. Data management technologies are becoming more advanced in leveraging ML algorithms within their software to not only automate data processing and analytics tasks, but also recommend additional intelligence in data aspects such as relationships, ontologies, and master data management.
Active metadata
The previous decade was filled with a lot of “passive” metadata. What this means is a human being entered metadata and constantly kept it updated. However, the new era is “active” metadata. The modern metadata platforms will collect data from logs, quieries, usage statistics, and databases automatically and will probably start building ontology models to provide meaning behind the metadata.
Another big leap is once the metadata is derived. Prukalpa, co-founder of Atlan, stated, “Active metadata platforms don’t just stop at intelligence. They drive action.” This includes actions such as alerts and real-time recommendations, and in some advanced platforms such as Atlan and Collibra, this action is automatically operationalized in data pipelines with out-of-the-box integrations with those data pipeline platforms.
Data governance
With data breaches, privacy concerns, cybersecurity risks, government mandates, and edge computing on acceleration mode, data governance is becoming more important than ever. While adaptive data governance has been on the rise, modern data stacks will allow acceleration of decentralized, low-code no-code, self-service technologies to support data governance at the masses. Every CDO’s dream of data democratization and business-IT collaboration can become an executable plan to deliver data governance at an enterprise level using cloud technologies.
In addition, low-code no-code data catalogs and data lineage tools help in the discovery and better understanding of data. Scoring mechanisms such as Data NPS, data ranking, and usage metrics will support the organizational maturity of becoming data driven.
Edge computing
With the growing number of IoT devices and adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies, edge computing will become more important. The focus of data management solutions will be processing data at scale in real-time, without latency or dependency on a centralized data center. In addition, usage of ML at the edge to dynamically calculate situational awareness and acting will demand even more in the world of big data. One of the challenges that data management teams and products must resolve is the dependency on network bandwidth and become more natively integrated into the IoT devices themselves – which is an interesting challenge to resolve.
Data management is evolving, and we can expect to see more advancements in cloud, AI, big data, governance, democratization, integration, edge computing, and security. Companies that can adapt and take advantage of these trends will be well-positioned to succeed in the years to come.