Organizations were drowning in data long before the pandemic. The era of centralized IT, data generation, and processing had given way to a rising tide of data generated in real-time by millions of devices and billions of transactions across their business.
Image Credit: Hazelcast Inc.
With the constraints of centralized technology in the rearview for leading companies, data has become the foundation of competitiveness, with practitioners building data-driven applications and services capable of leveraging this data in new ways to better engage employees, partners, and customers.
Alongside opportunity, however, decentralization has brought challenges. Among them is the emergence of a new category of data silos and a spectacular growth in unstructured data. Decentralization has therefore seen data become harder to discover, process, and analyze.
At the same time, IT professionals building data-driven applications have found themselves adapting to new foundational technologies and architectures: cloud-native patterns and technologies such as microservices that have moved from the proof-of-concept stage to the heart of production.
These changes have come at precisely the moment IT is expected to deliver the data-driven applications that help their organizations find value in real-time transactions or analytics to remain competitive.
These long-term shifts are well documented, but in the last year, a fresh set of trends has emerged that will shape the future and further challenge those building data-driven applications.
Research commissioned by Hazelcast sought to understand how organizations are responding to these challenges. The online, invitation-only survey spoke to 629 businesses and IT decision-makers in the U.S., Europe, and the Asia Pacific to find out.
Read the full report by Hazelcast.
