Industries and organizations are being greatly transformed by data and analysis. The field of data analytics has seen a massive shift where people are adapting the analytics to suit them rather than adapting their ways to fit in with traditional forms of analysis.

The power of data analysis is being more strongly embraced when making a vast majority of subjective decisions like branding and recruitment. More objective decisions that have always relied on data are ramping things up with more complex and sophisticated data than ever before.

Since there have recently been some massive shifts, let us take a look at some of the trends and predictions we can expect to see come the year 2020:

1) Data Analysis Automation

Automation has become quite highly favored in most industries to improve business and productivity. As such, it is no wonder that by the year 2020, we can expect to see over 40% of data-based tasks automated.

This should result in a higher rate of productivity as well as citizen data scientists having broader usage of data. Automation is highly favored in the digital world, and as a result, it’s now becoming a highly favored element in businesses and large corporations too.

Automation will additionally assist decision makers to efficiently see further ahead to assist in moving their organization forward with the correct analytics to drive decisions.

2) The Internet of Things meets Data Analytics

By 2020, we can expect to see over 20 billion active IoT (Internet of Things) devices. This means more devices from which to collect more data for analysis.

In large organizations where IoT devices are being incorporated into daily operations, they are also implementing the supporting technology to run capable data analytics.

As a result, we are going to see many more analytics solutions for IoT devices to provide not only relevant data but transparency too. Besides, 75% of organizations will be inhibited from achieving the full benefits of IoT due to a lack of professionals in the data science field.

3) In-memory Computing

Another trend that we can expect to be highly influential in 2020 is in-memory computing (IMC). Since the cost of memory has decreased in recent years, in-memory computing has become a mainstream technological solution for a variety of benefits in analysis.

The costs and complexity of taking up IMC are being reduced by the new persistent-memory technologies, a new memory tier that is situated between NAND flash memory and dynamic random-access memory.

It provides highly effective mass-memory to support high-performance workloads. This is highly valuable to organizations as they require not only much faster CPU performance, but also quicker storage and larger quantities of memory.

Given that the implementation of this solution is much more manageable, many industries are adopting IMC to help improve both application performance and provide a great opportunity for future scalability.

4) The Rise of Data as a Service

It is expected that up to 90% of large organizations will be generating some sort of revenue from data as a service (DaaS) in 2020. Data as a Service is a cloud-based technology that allows customers to access digital files via the internet.

With high-speed internet now easily accessible to most customers, the service is open to a wider audience. The globalization of DaaS will also assist in bridging gaps between departments within the larger organizations that need to share data but currently don’t have the capacity to do so.

DaaS will make sharing data in real-time quicker and easier, thus improving productivity within the organization.

5) Augmented Analytics is Growing

The trend of augmented analytics is quickly on the rise to become the dominant method used by 2020. Augmented analytics have shaken up the field by combining AI (artificial intelligence) techniques and machine learning to create a new way of creating, developing, sharing and consuming analytics.

With the augmented analytics market predicted to grow from 2018’s $8.4 billion to around $18.4 billion globally by the time 2023 arrives, it is no surprise that augmented analytics are already becoming the most popular to use for business analytics.

The benefits of augmented analytics include the ability to automate many analytics capabilities like preparation, analysis and building of models as well as the insights generated will be much easier with which to interact.

6) Security and Privacy of Data

In 2015, just less than 10% of large corporations were making use of backups and snapshots for more than just recovery. By 2020, it is expected that 30% of these corporations will be making use of backups and snapshots for safety, privacy and reliability within their security and identity management portfolios.

Although many organizations hold large volumes of backed up data containing personal and sensitive information, they have no intention of using it. In 2018, 10% of organizations accounted for backup and archives of personal data as their largest zone of privacy risk.

By 2020, privacy risk in the form of archived personal data will be the largest concern for 70% of organizations. It is advised that IT professionals consider this prediction when choosing products to upgrade or allocating budgets for the coming years.

7) Personal, Consumer Device Developments

Given the current trends with personal devices, mobile and web use, it is expected by 2020 that more than 50% of consumer mobile interactions will be experiences described at contextualized and hyperpersonal that is determined by the user’s past and real-time mobile behaviour.

Since mobile devices are being used in a variety of settings from at home to at work and everywhere in between, and the development of all kinds of new products like IoT, wearables and immersive technologies like virtual reality.

8) Personal Assistance Technologies

The personal technology space is changing so much faster now than it ever has before. By the time 2020 arrives, it is predicted that around 5% of people over the age of 65 years will have their own personal healthcare robot.

In such a lucrative market, growth in this market is inevitable. Plus, this prediction gives leaders in product management more information on how and where to grow their products to best serve their market.

9) The Development of Smart Cities

Once again, the Internet of Things is creating new opportunities for data analytics science. With the development of Smart Cities comes a need for data collection as well as data processing and dissemination.

Linked quite closely with the development of personal technologies, smart cities data will assist with medical, nursing and proactive health care. It is predicted that 30% of smart cities will have introduced robotics and smart machines at medical facilities by 2020.

The applications and solutions available to smart cities mean that IoT can be leveraged to provide a good user experience to residents as a means of improving their quality of life.

10) Automatic Management of Enterprise Content

Technology is slowly taking over the tasks of humans with 95% of image and video content expected to be audited by machines by 2020. The ECM market is estimated to reach $59.87 billion by 2020. Content management solutions within enterprises are being changed as new technologies make these processes quicker and easier with less manpower.

The 95% of content that machines will be reviewing is likely to never be viewed by humans. Instead, the machines vetting content will provide detailed analyses that are better capable of supporting organizations’ digital initiatives.

This also means that IT departments can leverage these analyses to increase productivity and open up new opportunities in mobile, social and cloud technologies.

11) Machine Learning and the Cloud

Cloud storage has become quite a popular means of safely storing digital files and with that comes new technological developments. Currently, 30% of cloud vendors are using third-party solutions in the form of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) in place of running their own infrastructure.

This is predicted to rise to 60% of vendors by the year 2022. Additionally, predictions for the year 2022 state that the hyperscale cloud providers like Microsoft, Apple and Google will be making use of cloud-based machine learning to acquire a 20% share of the market in platforms for data science.

12) Conversational Analytics and Natural Language Processing

Another trend for 2020 is the prediction that up to 50% of analytical queries will be either automatically generated or generated using voice or natural language processing (NLP). This will require that analytics tools be easy to use and access.

As such, this will allow anyone in an organization to analyze complex data combinations using a widely adopted and user-friendly analytics platform. On this platform, a simple search interface will render results or users will be able to engage in conversation with virtual assistants to retrieve information.

13) Predictions are Leading the Development of the Data Analytics World

The offering provided by data and analytics platforms is heavily influenced by the predictions and trends that are expected in the year 2020. As such, providers of these solutions will be applying changes based on the current forecasts.

Trends they will be following as we head into 2020 include the ‘spread of smart,’ the journey into context as well as intelligence for everyone.