Five Data Trends You Don’t Want to Miss in 2019

2019 is shaping up to be a breakout year for data, with major technologies converging to create new capabilities and change the way companies do business. Here are five trends taking off this year that you don’t want to miss.

AI and ML

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are moving from the experimentation and hype phase into real products and services that generate significant revenue. That trend will reach critical mass in 2019, said Domino Data Lab chief data scientist Josh Poduska in a post on Datanami.com “2019 will be the year that AI will become an organizational reality.”

Analysts at McKinsey & Company say that the retail and manufacturing industries have the most to gain from AI—up to a combined $4.6 trillion in additional annual revenue. For the retail industry, AI will boost sales and marketing efforts, while in manufacturing, predictive maintenance will keep assembly lines up and running longer and with less costly shutdowns.

Clouds

We’ve devoted a series of blog posts to the Top 10 Cloud Technologies Changing the World.

Clouds will only get bigger in 2019, according to Gartner. The analyst firm forecasts 17.5% growth for public cloud revenue this year, expanding at close to three times the rate of growth for all IT services through 2022. “Cloud services are definitely shaking up the industry,” Gartner research vice president Sig Nag said in a press release announcing Gartner’s predictions.

IoT

The number of internet of things (IoT) devices will pass 14 billion in 2019 and expand to 25 billion by 2025, predicts Gartner. All those smart speakers, industrial sensors, robots, medical devices, and more could boost the global economy by $11.1 trillion a year, according to McKinsey & Company senior partner Andre Ménard. He writes, “The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to fundamentally shift the way humans interact with the world around them.”

We covered the IoT in the first of our in-depth posts on the top 10 world-changing cloud technologies.

Data Governance

Last year, California enacted the toughest data privacy law in the United States. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCDP) goes into effect on January 1, 2020. With it, California joins the European Union—whose General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) started enforcement last year—in putting such regulations in place.

There’s more to come. “Multiple countries are implementing regulations inspired by the GDPR,” said Gartner analyst Bart Willemsen, “a movement that is likely to continue into the foreseeable future.”

The regulations put the onus on companies to protect the data they collect on users. That makes data governance—policies and technology for keeping tabs on and managing user data—a top priority for companies in 2019 and beyond.

Talent

Along with data, the technologies behind the trends on this list also depend on another vital resource: talent.

Companies are scrambling to find or train the people they need to advance in the digital era, confirms a report Cisco released this year. Expertise in cloud technologies tops the list of technical skills in short supply. But businesses are even more desperate for the business acumen needed to apply those skills intelligently. The struggle will only intensify in 2019 and beyond as organizations continue to undergo digital transformation.

Data and talent power the technologies on this list. But neither one of them could do their work without the infrastructure on which they both depend. Data centers, including those run by T5 Data Centers, provide the processing power, storage, and high-speed connections needed to make them all successful.