Trends 2016: Big Data, IoT take the plunge

By Vishwa Kiran

When data set becomes fairly large and complex, traditional data processing tools and techniques are often found inadequate. To solve this challenge, data scientists and computer engineers have developed a set of tools, processes and practices to collect, organise and analyse data which are collectively called Big Data. Big data analytics is the process of examining big data to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations and other useful information that can be used to make better decisions. High-performance analytics is necessary to process that much data in order to figure out what's important and what isn't.

IoT and Big Data are the two sides of same coin. The exciting developments in IoT industry are that the best cloud vendors in the industry are now opening up offerings that can allow us to build scalable IoT solutions on a pay as you go model. Examples such as “Azure IoT services and stream analytics” and “AWS IoT gateway services”, “AWS lambda” will help developers launch the next wave of applications in the IoT space.

The next year holds much promise in better tools for developers to leverage large sensor network data into new apps.  We are on the cusp of getting IoT into the mainstream application arena, where companies will offer connected devices to customer in many verticals.

Some of the trends that will drive Big Data and IoT segment in the year 2016 are:

Analytics in real-time: more and more of the actionable insights will be generated in real-time, rather than post mortem.

• Big Data will get cheaper and more accessible to mainstream IT applications

• IoT applications will drive more Big Data acceptance. Hyper-connected world where everything is now on the net. Convergence is the new mantra.

• More predictive applications, e.g. better fraud prevention, CRM and predictive maintenance.

• Enterprises will embrace Big Data and get away from traditional Data warehousing technologies.

• Data centres will shrink in size, not capacity and thus storage will be cheaper for Big Data. For example, a Data centre on a chip.

(The author, Vishwa Kiran, is CEO, Widas Concepts India)