Business Technology Roundtable

Earlier in the year, Gartner forecast that by year-end 2016, more than 50 percent of global companies will have stored customer-sensitive data in a public cloud platform. These services can scale very quickly, which has made them very popular for applications that have a requirement for flexibility. Cloud storage offers organizations significant cost and agility benefits, but can pose some security, privacy, accessibility and performance challenges. Therefore, a big part of selecting a best-fit cloud storage provider is investing the time to perform the research to fully understand its capabilities. Furthermore, most industry analyst prior market studies have uncovered that Line of Business leaders are most likely to procure public cloud service offerings for their organizations. However, survey participants at two recent business technology events on the East Coast were divided about who in their organization is primarily driving their cloud computing strategy. So, given these...

Senior executives have been waiting for actionable insight from the mass of information that their IT departments already gather about their customers. But many have become very impatient -- because they want to see results, now. Do you anticipate that data analytics and real-time visualization will advance next year? Ovum expects a significant wave of business technology ramp-ups in 2014, in response to the market demand . They predict a growing third-party vendor and IT services ecosystem that creates Big Data and Fast Data tools and solutions for the enterprise data warehousing and applications markets. This growing trend is occurring as SQL and Hadoop platforms are diversifying, adopting multiple personalities, and providing overlapping functions. According to Ovum’s latest market study, SQL queries can now be run against Hadoop, and many SQL databases will be able to handle JSON document-centric queries. And as silicon-based storage -- DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) and...