What is Data? Data is a valuable resource. Data is the next gold. Data is the new oil. Data is the brain of the company.

Data can be compared to a ton of things, however, I think a lot of us tend to miss the big picture—data is infinite, reusable, and is growing at a tremendous rate. No matter what you would like to compare data to—it finally boils down to a beautiful mix of structured and unstructured!

When the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to its knees in 2020, unstructured data reigned supreme. That period saw people spending more time on social media, the expansion of remote work and e-learning, and Dalgona coffee TikToks blowing up the internet. These changes drove the growth of unstructured data. Unstructured data was being created in millions of servers across the globe, ensuring that life and business could continue as normal. 

Source: Domo

Now that we have an idea of how huge data has become, let’s now look into what changes we expect to see in the world of data. Here is a summary of what G2 expects to see in the new year. 

Data in 2022: it is all about the quality

One of the biggest issues with data today is that businesses are aware of the enormous amount of data available but are unsure of ways to use it. Being aware that unstructured data can have bad data—unclean and improper—is the first step of the process. This brings us to an essential element in the data world: data quality. 

Data quality ensures that data is ready to be absorbed by any business intelligence and analytics platform. I'd like to put it this way: data quality tools will help separate the notes from the noise and create music.

At G2, an unusual trend we spotted was the steep increase of traffic coming to the Data Quality category during the first three months of 2021. One of the possible reasons for this growth could be that companies operate in the fiscal year. A new year usually means new IT budgets, spending plans, and strategy revamps. A spike in these months indicates that several viewers are looking at a ton of data quality products at the start of the year, aligning with their budgets and goals for the rest of the year, and deploying the software once decisions have been made final. 

Data mesh, DataOps, data fabric: why are companies talking about this?

Humans are known as social beings with a need to connect. We connect with people across the world and manage relationships. This may sound odd, but data is pretty much the same. 

To obtain meaningful data insights that businesses can use to their strategic advantage, data needs to be clean, in the correct formats, and connected with numerous disparate sources. Data management becomes valuable as we enter into a hyperconnected world with cloud computing, IoT, AI/ML, AR/VR, the metaverse, and so on. If we need all of them to work, data must be connected and configured.

We expect to see interest and renewed focus by businesses, both large and small, towards data management, and this is where data fabric, data mesh, and DataOps come in.

• Data fabric promises to provide data integrations across public cloud, on-premises, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and multicloud.
• Data mesh will focus on data integrations between users and on self-serve capabilities.
• DataOps is about binding people, processes, and technology to deliver a trusted data pipeline to users. DataOps platforms assemble several types of data management software into an individual, integrated environment. Data flows in a simple manner from various data sources.

Democratization of data: The conclusion of this saga

What do data quality, data mesh, and all the data loaded terms used today tend to achieve? How do we, as users, see the bigger picture? In my humble opinion, data democratization although not yet full fledged, is something to keep on the radar. 

With data democratization, nontechnical users are also able to access information to make key business decisions without needing to depend on the IT or data teams. Data democratization aims to bring in a sense of data literacy amongst tons of data users. 

According to a recent study that involved the 16-21 age group, only 43% consider themselves to be data literate, and a surprising 54% do not have the clarity of the concept itself.

Technologies such as data fabric and data mesh can help numerous organizations achieve data democratization and empower data consumers all across the globe. This will allow business units to access data, monetize it, help make insightful decisions, drive true business transformation, and help achieve data literacy. 

Ensuring all this happens safely with data visibility, and managing all these complexities requires a strong data governance framework, but that’s a discussion for another day. Coming back to my first question: so what is data really? To me, data is the lifeblood that runs throughout an organization—an indispensable factor that provides strength and life to any organization.