Increases are predicted once again for the coming new year, with public cloud platforms growing faster than private cloud applications.The last year helped to set the pace for this development: in the second quarter of 2018, Amazon’s cloud business grew nearly 48.9 percent, generating $6.11 billion in revenue.

IBM also reported in July that cloud revenue—including hardware, software, and services for hybrid, public, and private cloud solutions—had generated $18.5 billion year over year, up 23 percent.Microsoft is also on the rise; in October, the company reported that commercial cloud revenue, including Azure sales, hit $8.5 billion, up 47 percent from the year-ago quarter.

The growth margin for that business rose to 62 percent from 58 percent in the year-ago quarter and 59 percent in the prior quarter.While the big cloud providers are offering a wider range of tools and services to help drive this growth, users will still need internal/external cloud expertise—beyond the public providers—to implement their own IoT systems.

Forrester reports that industrial products will lead all industries in IoT adoption at 45 percent with an additional 22 percent planning to adopt IoT in the next 12 months.

According to Forbes, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) market is predicted to reach $123B in 2021, attaining a CAGR of 7.3 percent through 2020.

This will give executives the ability to analyze large quantities of industry and/or products-specific data and use that information for business intelligence and decision-making.Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) will also come into play, with IT executives opening up data that was formally siloed, enabling enterprises to derive informed insight on everything from product maintenance and development to daily operations.IoT Security Issues Keep IT Executives on Their ToesWith IoT and cloud platform adoption on the rise, security will continue to be a concern.

It might be an understatement to say that today’s business environment has become hyper-competitive, and the companies that aren’t continuously reinventing their business -- with data at the core -- will end up watching from the sidelines while their market is disrupted.

In fact, IDC predicted that global spending on digital transformation technologies and services was expected to increase by nearly 20% in 2018 to more than $1.1 trillion.At the foundation of the radical rethinking vital to digital transformation is intelligent management of the proliferation of data throughout the enterprise.

In addition, the harmonized and cleansed data must be able to be easily migrated into new systems error-free to accommodate the reinvention of the business.

Gartner measures the average financial impact of poor data on businesses at $9.7 million per year.”Keeping Data In CheckGetting the governance piece right is key as well, particularly in complex data landscapes.

Information governance uses a set of defined roles, processes and policies to help manage data assets and ensure their integrity, accuracy and security.

Without effective information governance, no one can be certain about what data assets an organization has, who controls them, what information they can provide and how they should be used.Good governance also increases the utility of data from new sources -- both inside and outside the organization -- and supports compliance efforts with regulations such as HIPAA and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).But beyond business and compliance requirements, data trust and understanding driven by established policies and rules form the basis for effective use of the algorithms used in machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI).