2012: A Look Back at Some of the Major Trends

2012 has certainly been an exciting year! London hosted the XXX Olympic games, the U.S. had an election, Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast, ‘The Hobbit’ is coming out soon, and that’s just the beginning! It’s been an interesting year for the IT world as well, and as we close in on 2013, I wanted to take a moment to look back on some of the big trends we’ve seen over the past 12 months and how they’ve impacted the industry. Here are some initial thoughts:

1)   Big data has grown enormously throughout 2012. We all expected big data to be a significant trend, but even those of us entrenched in the IT world were surprised at how big it became. These days, you can’t have a conversation about the cloud without discussing big data. It is everywhere, and it impacts all industries. We’re excited about what DataDirect is doing to connect customers to the cloud and critical data, and we look forward to more of it in 2013.

2)   Authentication and authorization of data in the cloud became a higher priority in 2012. The question now is no longer whether or not to access data across devices and platforms, but how to ensure security across disparate environments both on and off premise. We predicted that this would come to pass in 2012, and we saw it begin to manifest itself in the demand for Hive (which as of Hive 2 is getting basic authentication). This trend points to the importance of having a strong driver that runs on a stable and tested data interface grounded in security, such as ODBC.

3)   In January, we predicted that the days of complete visibility into big data were numbered, and we’ve seen that prediction play out throughout the year. There is simply too much information out there! Hadoop is helpful as a storage source, but on its own it’s just an engine. In order to make meaning out of the deluge of data, companies have had to focus on analytics and business intelligence suites to plug into the engine that is Hadoop and glean meaningful information out of the data stored there. We’ve seen the use of these add-on systems increase in 2012, and that will continue into the new year.

4)   Throughout 2012, as more companies began gaining revenue across the Internet, the move away from freeware and open source became more evident. We’ve been seeing this trend increase for some time now – free simply isn’t a sustainable model.  This has lead to an increased investment in dependable data connectivity solutions that provide complete security and system support.

There you have it, my look back at some of the industry-shaping trends we’ve seen this year. Tune in to my upcoming post on predictions for 2013. It will certainly be interesting to see what the new year brings!