Big Data, AI and IoT are currently three of the biggest business trends. Today, if someone is not using these in their operations, they are likely losing the competitive edge. Just to give you a sense of 2018 (so that you don’t feel left out) here are a few technology predictions made by Scott Gnau, CTO of Hortonworks:

Managing data sprawl while balancing cloud costs will be an issue

Scalability will be the key word for 2018 as enterprises continue to seek insight from their growing pools of data but also attempt to limit the costs of cloud growth.

Cloud has always been linked with scalability. Earlier, enterprises used to rent a part of a server (shared hosting) and host their website. If their site became popular and received more traffic, they would move to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) or a server like Dedicated Server Hosting. But as the internet gained popularity, businesses became increasingly dependent on their websites. This required more resources which ultimately led companies buying up VPS or Dedicated Server, just in case the traffic goes up. Also, servers were no longer just hosting websites but spread across business functions. As the volume of data grew, costs grew in kind.

With the cloud, the business model has shifted from buying fixed cost server resources to lower-cost cloud services that provide flexibility to access their data resources as and when they require.

There are many solutions to control and monitor cloud costs. Likewise, artificial intelligence can also be used to track and predict usage and issues that increase scalable costs. Such advances mean that cloud can certainly become scalable in the future.

Artificial Intelligence will wave its magic wand over business processes

While Artificial Intelligence has already led to greater efficiencies in sectors such as customer service, thanks to the creation of chat bots, these types of efficiencies will soon be applied to business services that stretch across the entire breadth of the business.

According to renowned data scientist Andrew Ng, ‘artificial intelligence (AI) needs to be a company-wide strategic decision. Companies that don’t strategically invest in AI will slowly lose market share to companies whose core businesses are built around AI’.

There are lot of benefits of AI as it enables prediction, planning and automation of a variety of tasks. The four latest trends which are affecting enterprises are: – Large-scale machine learning, deep learning, human-enhanced AI and autonomous systems. Owing to these trends are less expensive and more powerful hardware, and end-to-end data platforms that maximize the value of data-in-motion and securely store, manage and perform complex processing of data-at-rest.

IoT will move beyond industrial and into the mainstream

The infrastructure for industrial IoT already exists – think sensors on rigs for oil and gas or on the plant for in manufacturing – but this will transform into a bigger IoT ecosystem over the next year which touches many parts of our day-to-day lives.

Beyond fitness trackers and health monitors, we will see a rapid proliferation of connected devices and related data generation. Organizations will need to plan for these waves of data, building out their data architecture and even creating new lines of business in advance.

While we are still in the early stages of consumer-focused applications, their adoption rate will only continue to grow. CTO’s ready their organizations to manage multiple and hybrid cloud footprints while also ensuring that they are fully equipped to manage their needs around data governance and regulation.