Top Big Data Trends to Affect Your Business in 2021

The global Big Data market size is growing year by year. Data-driven decisions have become standard for numerous industries around the world.

Businesswire reports that 98.8% of organizations affirm investments in Big Data projects. The reasons are clear: it helps to understand and anticipate customer needs, scan the hottest trends in social media, analyze all kinds of external and internal threats to your company.

Following industry leaders, many companies seek Big Data and Analytics expertise to embrace the opportunities awaiting there. Everyone wants to know what is coming for the industry as well. Let’s disclose the trends in Big Data and look at the challenges that may dominate in 2021.

Big Data Trends

Machine Learning to Sustain Hunting for Insights

Together, Big Data and Machine Learning are forecast to expand their reach to new arenas. Experts from Market Research Future (MRFR) predict that The ML market will grow from $7.3B in 2020 to $30.6B in 2024.

Machine Learning and AI rapidly extend their abilities with more advanced algorithms and intelligent services. Their elements integrate into the company's processes to extract insights and assure fast and robust problem-solving without manual assistance. Together, they are going to provide more opportunities to analyze the data flow coming from numerous sources, be it sensors, applications, or Google search queries.

Demand for NLP Systems to Rise

According to Gradient Flow, NLP budgets saw steady growth in 2020 compared to the previous year.  It means that despite the pandemic and its significant blow on IT budgets, tech leaders are beginning to see the benefits of NLP.

Companies plan to focus on systems that can capture a customer’s voice and translate it into machines’ language. With the technology, it will be possible to dig deeper into customer attitudes and preferences and achieve better outcomes for other crucial initiatives. It, in turn, will lay the groundwork for developing virtual assistants or chatbots with “conversational” capabilities. Using Big Data analytics tools, further advancements are likely to bring the concept closer next year.

Big Data to Transform Skill Sets

A promising Big Data market forecast has already fueled the specialization of roles within IT departments. It creates an urge for companies to search for talent with industry-specific expertise rather than an MBA degree. 

The Chief Data Officer (CDO) position is becoming the hottest Big Data trend in 2021. Companies appoint such a specialist to address challenges of data availability, integrity, and security. The most recent survey conducted by NewVantage indicated that 76% of industry-leading companies have a CDO in place. 

The same survey, however, indicates that there is much room for improvement in defining their responsibilities. It looks like that the definition of the role is going to be revised in the years to come.

Data-as-a-Service to Grow in Demand

Almost every company is going to recognize the benefits of data as a service (DaaS) in the next couple of years. DaaS delivers data in streams that are tailored to subscribers’ needs. Now, relatively few businesses have in-house resources to access data streams and manipulate that data efficiently. 

DaaS can eliminate the need for internal data management teams as it offers a robust means to quickly and easily access external data sources. Big Data as a service will give you more control over company-wide data and fill the gap between departments. Data lake proliferation and secure cloud-based solutions can make relevant data available in an easy-to-use and safe format.

5G to Speed Up Data Transmission

The need for reliable Internet connectivity and an ever-growing number of IoT sensors have triggered the demand for active 5G deployments. The technology is likely to provide a high-throughput data pipeline that can handle huge data volumes to integrate the data coming from various sources. 

The technology will improve user experience by connecting household-level wearable tech, VR-assistants, and health-monitoring devices. At the industrial level, 5G will be powered by the Big Data technology stack to provide faster and safer ways to collect and process data.

Edge Computing to Gain Numerous Adopters

What is edge computing? The technology refers to shifting the data processing infrastructure closer to the data generation source. Sending business-critical data to the cloud or centralized data systems is no longer sufficient as it used to be in the previous years. The urge for fast, near real-time processing of data streams, goes hand in hand with Big Data growth. 

Local data processing and real-time data analysis are likely to grow exponentially in the coming years. Due to the growing number of IoT, AR/VR, ML, Robotics, and other use cases that require intensive workloads.

Actionable Data to Put More Insights to Work

One of the trends in Big Data analytics trends is related to the increased focus on faster data processing and hunting for insights. When examined and appropriately organized, Big Data can create meaningful connections between unstructured information and business value. In this way, it can facilitate informed business decisions and streamline operations. 

The need for improvements in data collection and processing will continue to put to the fore Big Data Hadoop, Spark, and other analytics tools. Their value is forecast to grow exponentially in 2021 as more and more companies embracing the hunt for actionable data.

Cloud Big Data Technologies to See Rapid Growth

Big Data and Cloud computing enable organizations to store and process large volumes of data irrespective of their location. Previously, they would have to physically expand their premises to scale operations and analyze complex data sets. 

Within a few years, Big Data Cloud-based solutions are likely to become mainstream but with certain limitations.

Another prediction concerning Cloud computing lies in the field of gaming. The Wunderman Thompson Intelligence report predicts that 2021 may become a turning point in the on-demand play. Industry heavyweights including Microsoft, Sony, Facebook, and Tencent have noticed the shift to on-demand entertainment dominating in 2020. As a result, they are predicted to invest more in their cloud-streamed gaming services.

Data Sustainability to Become One of the Major Goals

The rapid development of Cloud computing, Big data analytics tools, AI, ML, and content streaming has already caused urgent environmental implications. As the volume of information stored on data centers grows exponentially, it urges companies to work towards renewable energy solutions. 

Data sustainability is one of the dominant issues of 2021 raised in the previously mentioned Wunderman Thompson Intelligence report. As of 2020, the infrastructure around digital technologies consumed 2% of global electricity. It is also responsible for a growing percentage of greenhouse gas emissions.

To reduce the environmental impact of the technology, governments are going to embrace regulations concerning energy consumption and nurture ecological awareness. In this regard, the turn to green data centers is anticipated to bring about tangible results. According to Mordor Intelligence, the carbon-neutral data centers market is forecast to grow by a CAGR of 23.01 % by 2026.

Big Data Challenges

Along with its potential, Big Data issues and challenges can’t be ignored. This happens because more data than ever have been created in recent years. 

The advent of wearable devices and other IoT technology-based gadgets has generated massive data influx from ordinary users. Only a small amount of this data is accessible for further analysis with Apache Hadoop, Spark, or other frameworks.

Other Concerns to Be Addressed Are:

• Data complexity and reliability: those challenge numerous companies willing to make informed decisions. Companies need to learn how to work with vast amounts of data and develop their solutions to process raw data.
• Data security: data is coming from various sources, making it hard to pinpoint a compromised one. Organizations will have to work out appropriate practices to secure data collection and retrieval.
• Data protection: did you know that the Internet handles 400,000 hours of video streamed on Netflix and almost 42 million messages shared via WhatsApp every 60 seconds? According to data obtained by VisualCapitalist, the figures are going to rise significantly in the coming years Should those forecasts come true, there will be mountains of sensitive data that will require consistent regulation and protection.

Organizations that process personal data have to comply with data protection regulations introduced by GDPR. The California Consumer Privacy Act had also come into action in 2020. Businesses will be under pressure to keep up with the ongoing changes as failure to comply will result in hefty penalties. Considering those regulations, GDPR-compliant software development is likely to become one of the most important offerings in the industry.

In a recent couple of years, Internet users have already created more data than ever before. Big Data is transforming the way businesses operate, and there is no sign of it slowing down. We believe that 2021 will be another crucial year with trends in Big Data and analytics staying on top of the agenda.