Big data is making headway in every corner of the business world. Industries worldwide have seen a substantial increase in volume, variety and velocity of data. Each passing year witnesses almost two-fold increase in data most of which comes from IoT.  According to IDC, worldwide revenues for big data and business analytics will grow more than $203 billion by 2020. By 2025, there will be around 180 Zettabytes of data per year.

We’ve previously analyzed the digital transformation trends and the trends that we expect to see in the Internet of Things (IoT). It’s about time we analyze the Big Data trends that will most likely make headlines in the year 2018 and beyond.

Big Data To Facilitate Prescriptive Analytics

Prescriptive analytics reduces the risk in strategic decision making to improve profitability, enhance customer satisfaction, and create first-in-market opportunities by leveraging the promise of big data. This type of business analytics turns raw data into useful insights, determines the actions to be taken and identifies the best profitable outcomes in a structured manner. The growing use and value of prescriptive analytics will drive the future of Big Data in the years ahead. Prescriptive analytics, a powerful blend of machine learning, simulations, and mathematical optimization, will help enterprise leaders make well-informed, data driven decisions as it matures. Cognitive computing is also expected to bring a sophisticated level of fluidity to analytics.

Digital Transformation Of The Un-Digitized Data

Dark data signifies a great opportunity for companies to gain valuable insights for their businesses. In 2018, with the rise of Big Data, there will be significant mutual efforts made towards the recovery and digitization of historical data which still remains in the dark. The revelation of historical data cannot happen immediately, but the benefits of this transformation are worth the wait as it can help make accurate predictions for the future.

Data Quality Over Quantity

Piling up massive amounts of data and letting it grow is counterproductive in every possible way.  When we talk about big data, it presents a challenge in conjunction with the opportunity. The subject under attention is to determine what data to focus on and what to ignore as focus on the wrong datasets wouldn’t yield the expected results for the particular business needs. Datasets can be irrelevant, inaccurate, or even corrupted due to improper data acquisition methods. This issue is already being discussed by the industry experts and 2018 is likely to focus on data quality apart from the quantity alone.

AI To Enhance Security And Safeguard Data

Data security will be a major concern for all companies in 2018 and it’s already high time to invest in resolving this challenge. This year, Artificial Intelligence is expected to thoroughly inspect the security domain. Machines will soon be able to predict human psychology quite accurately and comprehend unlabeled data without any human intervention. Therefore, with this enhanced potential, AI will become the most robust tool for data protection and the top defense mechanism.

Specialization Of Job Roles

Digital revolution has transformed every organization into a technology organization. The massive increase in the value and volume of big data would empower the companies to adapt in certain ways. Skilled data scientists and other experts will most likely be appointed for specific job roles to handle various stages in the data pipeline such as extraction, transformation, loading, analytics etc. With this demand for experienced data professionals, IBM projects the job market for big data professionals will grow during 2018 from 364,000 openings to 2,720,000 by 2020. By 2019, 90% of large global companies will have an appointed CDO, Gartner predicts.