For businesses to operate effectively, and to tread a less rocky path in 2022 compared to this year, then investment in cloud security and databases are required, among other technological led innovations.

Buno Pati of Infoworks considers the shifts he expects in the technology industry in 2022,as he explains to Digital Journal.

Cloud Migration’s Inconvenient Truth

Pati says the lure of the cloud is strong, but will the promised solutions deliver? Tread carefully, says Pati: “The urgent imperative for companies to leverage the cloud (including hybrid- and multi-cloud) to enable scale and agility of analytics, be increasingly data-driven and drive digital transformation, is evidenced by the migration of data and analytics to the cloud. The cloud migration services market – valued at $88 billion in 2019 – is expected to grow to $51 billion by 2027, reflecting a CAGR of nearly 25 percent. However, in 2022, many of these initiatives will fall well short of expectation and business objectives, costing tens to hundreds of millions of dollars and burning countless hours of expensive data talent in the process. Legacy methodologies and point tools to drive migration efforts will provide very expensive efforts in failure.”

2022: An Urgent Need for a Modern Data Infrastructure

For a business to act effectively, it needs a functional database. Pati explains: “The experiences of the past 18-plus months have underscored the critical need of a modern data infrastructure in both private and public sectors. Data-based decisions and data-driven digital interactions cannot be made without the availability of the right data, at the right place, at the right time. We will recognize 2022 as an inflection point for adoption of comprehensive, automated solutions for hybrid multi-cloud data operations and orchestration.”

Operationalization of Data Fabric Technologies

The next subject that Pati selects is data fabric. Data fabric is a single environment consisting of a unified architecture, and services or technologies running on that architecture.

For 2022 Pati predicts we “Will see significant growth and interest in data fabric solutions as companies seek to leverage a common management layer to accelerate analytics migration to the cloud, ensure security and governance, quickly deliver business value by supporting real-time, trusted data across hybrid-multi-cloud – all in driving digital transformation. We believe this technology will be broadly adopted over the next five years.”

Automation v. Opportunity Cost: Real Value for Data Talent

To be effective firms need the right people, yet there are many reports on a shortfall of skilled personnel. What is Pati’s take on this? Well: “A lot has been written recently about the “Great Resignation” – against this backdrop, consider the particular implications regarding scarce data engineering and data science talent, already in very high demand and commanding significant compensation. Though critical to driving digital transformation, currently nearly 80 percent of their time is spent on lower-value activity such as ingesting, incrementally updating, organizing and managing data. In the coming year, adoption of new automated approaches to data operations and orchestration will free this critical talent pool from the mundane and focus these valuable professionals on creating and delivering business value.”