Data insights have never been more vital to business operations than they are today. Line-of-business (LOB) teams rely on data insights to drive sustainable growth, lead business operations, and understand customer behaviors and needs. The growing demand for data analytics has spurred a flourishing $31 billion-plus industry of established and emerging tech companies—but is the data analytics tech stack working for enterprises? Despite years of investment and effort, research indicates that 95% of businesses still struggle with operational challenges around data and analytics, leaving only 5% with the competitive advantage data-driven decision making delivers.
Posted April 11, 2024
Data management needs AI and machine learning (ML), and, just as important, AI/ML needs data management. As of now, the two are connected, with the path to successful AI "intrinsically linked to modern data management practices," said Dan Soceanu, senior product manager for AI and data management at SAS. Blazing this path requires "prioritizing data quality, accessibility, and governance."
Posted April 11, 2024
AI talent is in high demand; AI reveals brain oscillations for memory and disease; AI may allow us to talk to whales; AI can help plan meals and other tasks; an AI platform for dentistry just raised $53 million. That was the tip of the AI news iceberg—in one day. Has technology ever garnered so much interest, so widely, so fast? Amid the hype lies the incalculable promise of AI—and the fear of getting left behind by competitors that figure it out first. It's no wonder that organizations are rushing to implement AI, ready or not. The trouble is, many are not ready.
Posted April 11, 2024
Data makes the world go round, but there are gaps in the data needed to make the products and raw materials that move around the world. Unforeseen events around the globe—such as weather, wars, ships running aground, or infrastructure issues such as the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse that closed the main shipping lane in and out of the Port of Baltimore—can wreak havoc with even the most carefully planned supply chains.
Posted April 11, 2024
Regulations are constantly evolving, becoming more punitive with larger fines and penalties every year. As a result, there is a collective industry movement toward the continuous improvement of cybersecurity in business and their ecosystem. This includes understanding what policies and processes must be implemented to remain compliant.
Posted March 14, 2024
Public cloud has skyrocketed to become the indisputable go-to destination for new IT workloads, especially for data. And while the cloud is full of advantages over on-premises data platforms, cost optimization rarely makes that list. Since modern data professionals' roles encompass building and maintaining this platform, they should also be aware of how to objectively reduce the data platform costs to eliminate this enormous, missed business opportunity.
Posted February 08, 2024
The momentous transformation putting data managers and their systems at the helm of modern enterprises has only begun. Industry leaders and experts agree that it's critical for data managers and team leaders to design today's data architectures to meet the demands of a digital economy, from cloud to real-time streaming to AI.
Posted February 08, 2024
Both operational and generative AI depend on distilling reliable data sources. A new survey, however, finds they are being overwhelmed by data sources and providing the data needed to deliver insights. In a survey of 600 chief data officers and data professionals released by Informatica, 41% admit they're juggling 1,000 or more data sources. A number, 79%, expect to increase in 2024.
Posted February 08, 2024
Much like organizations in every sector, federal government agencies run on data. The universal challenge of dealing with massive amounts of data every day, while leveraging the right data at the right time, is also very much front and center for government agencies. Amid the growth of computing platforms, mobile devices, and cloud environments, government agencies have steadily added new systems and capabilities, but they've often integrated those systems on an ad hoc basis—as point solutions to address specific needs.
Posted February 08, 2024
Cybersecurity is more crucial than ever, especially for enterprise applications running the SAP platform. Why put a spotlight on SAP platforms? Because SAP platforms are used by 99 of the Fortune 100 companies and have more than 280 million cloud subscribers worldwide. Many companies run SAP ERP, SAP SRM, and SAP HCM environments while simultaneously moving SAP implementations to the cloud. Due to the massive scaling of SAP systems, organizations are losing track of their vulnerability as hyperscalers, SaaS models, on-prem, and cloud-based systems continue to expand the attack surface.
Posted January 11, 2024
In the year ahead, data managers and their enterprises will be at a crossroads. Organizations will be leaning more heavily than ever on data—and the teams that manage it—for success with their customers, markets, and operations. The world of data is changing rapidly, and with it, its role in the business, from sitting on databases in the back end to competitive differentiation. Data is driving everything, everywhere.
Posted January 11, 2024
Data managers, administrators, engineers, and analysts know more than anyone what kind of data is available to enterprises seeking to compete in the AI and analytics age. However, their perceptions of data quality are slipping—even though data quality has increased in importance due to the rise of analytics, AI, IoT, data monetization, and other next-generation initiatives.
Posted January 11, 2024
Data continues to grow and is poised to double in 2024. To help make the process of identifying useful products and services easier, each year, DBTA presents a list of Trend-Setting Products. These products, platforms, and services range from long-established offerings that are evolving to meet the needs of their loyal constituents to breakthrough technologies that may only be in the early stages of adoption.
Posted December 06, 2023
Data quality is becoming a hot button issue as more and more businesses aggressively move into artificial intelligence (AI)—both generative and operational—which requires massive amounts of accurate and timely data. The rise of large language models (LLMs)—both publicly available as well as contained within enterprises—to support business decision making and customer communications means data is being pressed into service in new and highly demanding ways as training data and real-time streaming feeds.
Posted November 30, 2023
U.S. President Joe Biden signed an ambitious executive order on artificial intelligence that aims to balance the needs of cutting-edge technology companies with national security and consumer rights, creating an early set of guardrails that could be fortified by legislation and global agreements. The order is an initial step that is meant to ensure that AI is trustworthy and helpful, rather than deceptive and destructive. The order—which will likely need to be augmented by congressional action—seeks to steer how AI is developed so that companies can profit without putting public safety in jeopardy.
Posted October 31, 2023
According to Gartner, global spending on the public cloud is expected to increase by approximately 20.7% to reach $591.8 billion (about $1,800 per person in the U.S.) in 2023. The advantages of migrating to the cloud are widely recognized. By adopting cloud-first models, businesses can move away from traditional, fixed-cost methods of managing IT infrastructure. Cloud migration allows for controllable, agile, and secure operations that can easily scale as needed while optimizing costs.
Posted October 12, 2023
It may be well-understood that cybersecurity needs to be front and center in all technology projects, but organizations are still slow or hesitant to fully commit to it. This is becoming a problem for data-intensive organizations, which need to brace for an onslaught of both external and internal threats. Only about one-half of organizations are beginning to recognize how important cybersecurity is from the start in any transformation effort, an Accenture survey of 3,000 executives shows.
Posted October 12, 2023
For most enterprises these days, hyperscale data workloads and AI have become the norm and are driving data strategies. However, while conventional wisdom dictates that this means greater reliance on cloud services and cutting-edge approaches to manage data pipelines, there's a place for more well-tread approaches as well. Many data managers intend to beef up their data warehouse capabilities and even return to on-prem systems in the near future.
Posted October 12, 2023
Today's applications—including enterprise applications—need to be always on and always available and often must serve a global base of users who expect almost instantaneous response times regardless of where they are located. Meeting these challenges doesn't just mean happier users: There are direct bottom-line benefits for every business able to tackle the underlying issues of low latency and ultra-high availability. Because of the fundamental role the database plays in every application tech stack, the most logical place to tackle these issues is at the database layer. One of the best and most cost-effective ways to do this is by deploying applications on top of a distributed relational database.
Posted October 12, 2023
Cisco announced it's acquiring Splunk, the cybersecurity and observability leader, building on Splunk's heritage of helping organizations enhance their digital resilience and will accelerate Cisco's strategy to securely connect everything to make anything possible.
Posted September 22, 2023
For more and more organizations, real time is not only the right time—it's the only time that matters. No longer can decision makers afford to only understand the material events affecting their businesses a month, a day, or even just a few hours after the fact. They need a sense of what is happening in the moment to be able to predict and adjust for events that are arising. The value of real-time data "is that it provides needed information to accelerate business insights so teams can make better informed decisions and avoid the issues around using older data," said Tarun Chopra, vice president of product management for data and AI at IBM.
Posted August 10, 2023
Existing data infrastructures are crumbling under the weight of data, leading to unsustainable energy consumption, increased management complexity, and declining security. That's the word from a recent survey of 1,288 executives, released by Hitachi Vantara. The survey also finds 76% feel their current data infrastructures "will be unable to scale to meet upcoming demands"—such as AI. Another 61% report they are simply "overwhelmed" by the amount of data they manage. By 2025, the report's authors predict, large organizations will be storing more than 65 petabytes (PB) of data.
Posted August 10, 2023
With more data than ever being created, making the right choices among the countless options for data management and analytics is a top priority for many organizations. To help organizations progress along their data-driven journeys, each year, DBTA presents the Readers' Choice Awards, which provide the opportunity to recognize companies whose products have been selected by the experts—our readers.
Posted August 09, 2023
Developers have a strong affinity for deploying their applications on open-source database engines, such as MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) offers these engines as a managed service and manages complex and time-consuming administrative tasks, such as database engine software installation and upgrades, storage management, replication for high availability and read throughput, and backups for disaster recovery.
Posted July 28, 2023
According to PWC's "Future of Experience" survey, 73% of respondents view customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions. Nevertheless, understanding the customer journey can be a difficult and lengthy process for many product developers. Outdated software, the lack of a customer-focused culture, and data silos all contribute to a negative experience.
Posted July 13, 2023
Now that we're emerging from the pandemic and the dust is starting to settle, organizations are taking a good, hard look at their digital transformation and modernization priorities moving forward. To shed light on the adoption and maturity of trending data architectures and where the industry is headed, Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, partnered with Radiant Advisors to field the latest survey, "Market Study: 2023 Modern Data Architecture Trends," sponsored by Cambridge Semantics, Informatica, Kinetica, Teradata, and Vertica.
Posted July 13, 2023
All eyes are on AI this year, with the space heating up as generative AI arrived on the scene with the popularity of ChatGPT technologies, along with new tools for automation and ease of use allowing companies to gain deeper insights into their analytics and better serve their customers.
Posted July 12, 2023
The healthcare industry, much like other industries, is witnessing a surge in data growth due to Electronic Health Records (EHR), medical imaging, population sequencing, and claims processing. According to the World Economic Forum, hospitals generate 50 petabytes of info every year, yet 97% goes underutilized for various reasons, such as data sitting in silos, being stored as unstructured and semi-structured data, and more.
Posted July 06, 2023
There's no question that this year, we're seeing dramatic upheavals in the data and analytics space. AI, of course, is the subject du jour, but any discussion of AI and its potential must, by necessity, involve the data teams that provide the information that makes AI successful. Here are what industry leaders and experts see as the most important technologies shaping the growth of data-driven enterprises.
Posted June 08, 2023
The issue of data silos has long hamstrung the efforts of data managers and their business counterparts to get an accurate, real-time picture of their enterprises. Now, a recent study suggests that open source technologies and data cloud platforms are helping to clear up these silos. Is this finally the long-sought, silo-busting holy grail?
Posted June 08, 2023
The need to balance data safety with new data initiatives, deliver business value, and change company culture around data tops this year's list of data and analytics management challenges. To help bring new resources and innovation to light, each year, Database Trends and Applications magazine presents the DBTA 100, a list of forward-thinking companies seeking to expand what's possible with data for their customers. Spanning the wide range of established legacy technologies from MultiValue to cutting-edge breakthroughs such as Web3, the DBTA 100 is a list of hardware, software, and service providers working to enable their customers' data-driven future.
Posted June 07, 2023
The global hype surrounding ChatGPT, large language models (LLMs), and generative AI has launched a plethora of conversations about its efficacy in the business sphere; yet understanding how to best leverage these tools remains rather elusive. At Data Summit 2023, David Seuss led the session, "Investigating Neural Networks and AI," focusing on what ChatGPT, LLMs, and generative AI are, as well as how they can provide a competitive edge for a wide variety of organizations seeking to drive positive business outcomes.
Posted May 11, 2023
MLOps can streamline machine learning development, thus increasing operational effectiveness. With this in mind, Joey Jablonski, VP, analytics, Pythian, looked at the journey to defining and implementing an MLOps solution for the organization during his Data Summit 2023 presentation, "Building MLOps Organizations for Scale."
Posted May 11, 2023
Data science methods provide a means to establish analytic tradecraft, capable of managing a large amount of data, allowing for full characterization of actor behaviors, and providing valuable insights. Efrain Rodriquez, data manager, U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), presented a case study on how the intelligence community (IC) is addressing these challenges by establishing innovative AI/ML governance and data management methodologies, during his Data Summit 2023 session, "Using Data Management Methodologies to Foster Development of Transformational AI/ML Tradecraft."
Posted May 11, 2023
Databases contain valuable business assets; ensuring this information is secure is paramount. SQL Compliance Manager by Idera can protect those assets and help address your industry's strict regulatory compliance requirements with confidence, providing HIPAA-compliance, GDPR-compliance, and more.
Posted April 14, 2023
Are we finally seeing the democratization of artificial intelligence (AI)? New research out of OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania suggests that generative AI, thanks to open and widely available tools such as ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) models and GPT-4, will be part of the jobs of at least 80% of occupational groups.
Posted April 13, 2023
The pandemic significantly accelerated the pace of technological advancement and digital transformation, generating a need for new digital programs and solutions. The drive to meet this demand has increased pressure on IT departments, which, in turn, has heightened collaboration between IT and line-of-business (LOB) executives. Business technologists, or staff members who are not in the IT department but leverage technology to solve their business problem to improve the productivity of their department, are increasingly choosing the applications, technology frameworks, and platforms that help them solve their business problems without heavy reliance on IT.
Posted April 13, 2023
Just a few years ago, no one would have imagined running their SQL Server databases on anything other than Windows Server. Now, with companies requiring data-driven capabilities for a range of needs, the idea of running SQL Server on a non-Windows platform has become almost commonplace—whether on open-source operating systems or in the cloud.
Posted April 13, 2023
In mid-2020, I got a chance to work with several government tourism agencies. Their mandate was to promote local attractions and offer support to partners such as hotels, resorts, and other organizations. As you can imagine, things weren't going well for these agencies. I remember looking at their data reports and seeing unprecedented drops in volume. With every country imposing restrictions and lockdowns, no one was traveling. One agency stood out; it was completely frozen by the situation. It couldn't decide on anything. Even publishing the latest COVID numbers was difficult.
Posted April 13, 2023
Organizations rely heavily on SAP systems and applications to run crucial business processes; securing these systems against cyber-attacks is vital. While several cybersecurity frameworks exist to manage cyber risks, they use generic wording that is hard to apply to application security and lack specific guidance to cover SAP environments. As a result, organizations must select the right frameworks to enhance their security posture and streamline complex security operations to safeguard critical assets from attacks.
Posted March 09, 2023
Observability by definition is a measure of how well internal states of a system can be inferred from knowledge of its external outputs. In other words, a system's behavior is determined from its outputs—information obtained by certain measures. Though observability as a term has been used for many years, the modern understanding originates in software observability, which is the ability to collect data about program execution, internal states of modules, and communication between components.
Posted February 09, 2023
While the emerging constellation of next-generation data architectures—fabric, mesh, and cloud—is extremely appealing, it's still full of unknowns. These approaches present opportunities for greater data democratization, but also increased complexity. Understanding the distinctions between data fabric and mesh are also important before moving to this architecture.
Posted February 09, 2023
Data analytics—and the people who make it happen—has emerged as the centerpiece of enterprises as they advance through the turbulent months ahead. Many of these efforts are gelling around the formation of dedicated C-level leaders, such as chief data officers and chief data analytics officers (CDOs and CDAOs, respectively).
Posted February 09, 2023
In 2009, AWS pioneered fully-managed cloud database services for open-source database management systems (DBMS) with the launch of Amazon Relational Database Service, or Amazon RDS. The ambition was to accelerate the adoption of open-source databases, like MySQL and PostgreSQL, so developers can focus on building new applications while removing the worries associated with managing database instances. In parallel, AWS has fostered a close relationship with multiple open-source communities to accelerate the adoption of open-source databases while providing enhancements that developers want with over 435 accepted contributions from the AWS Databases team back to the open-source communities, year-to-date.
Posted February 03, 2023
Uncertain economic conditions, skills shortages, rising automation, increasing regulation, and digital disruption—all add up to a stew of both challenges and opportunities for data managers in the year ahead. Emerging technologies—and new attitudes—are reshaping the look and scope of the information management landscape, with implications for overall business strategies and individual careers alike.
Posted January 12, 2023
Moving to the cloud may seem, on its surface, a good way to better manage the quality and viability of data resources for enterprises. However, as data accelerates its move to the cloud, the complexity involved in assuring quality and viability has only increased.
Posted January 12, 2023
For the eighth consecutive year, Amazon Web Services is named a leader in Gartner's annual "Magic Quadrant" rankings for the cloud database space. The new rankings, which evaluate the world's top 20 data and analytics companies, have elevated AWS into first place as the leader in vision, as well as ability to execute. At its recent re:Invent conference, the company unveiled a new generation of enhancements which introduce greater performance and integration to its cloud-based databases services.
Posted January 10, 2023
Today's data environments are highly diverse—residing on many platforms and requiring a variety of approaches to ensure data resiliency and availability. Delivering technology alone will not be enough in 2023. To help make the process of identifying useful products and services easier, each year, DBTA presents a list of Trend-Setting Products. These products, platforms, and services range from long-established offerings that are evolving to meet the needs of their loyal constituents, to breakthrough technologies that may only be in the early stages of adoption.
Posted December 08, 2022
In the ever-shifting markets professionals work in today, companies must have the ability to remain agile and flexible throughout their business operations. To combat the uncertainties of the marketplace and customer demands for fast service, businesses have turned to open-source technology over the past decade. Open-source technologies provide IT and development teams with the agility to implement innovative tools and practices—such as DevOps and Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD).
Posted December 08, 2022
When designing a data center, a recognized set of principles is typically followed. Scalability, resiliency, reliability, and sustainability are all essential, but the most important common feature for data center products may be flexibility. The equipment cabinet should likewise be flexible, but this has not always been the case. There has been a rethinking of the way IT infrastructure, power, and cooling converge—and the data center cabinet is starting to adapt.
Posted November 10, 2022