Despite the immense potential for efficiency offered by the proliferation of cloud and SaaS solutions, integration of these solutions into often disparate enterprise IT frameworks continues to be a challenge for many businesses. Even traditional B2B integration faces greater complexity with the growing adoption of cloud and SaaS applications. Building on this complexity are things such as changes to privacy regulations that have occurred over the past decade – particularly in relation to healthcare and financial data – as well as the speed of data demands from distributed supply chains.
Over the next year, I anticipate that businesses will increasingly look to managed services that offer industry expertise, proven processes and in-depth technology to streamline cloud integration and data management initiatives that have been implemented over the past several years. With data volume, variety, velocity and therefore complexity increasing, companies are beginning to realize that integration and data management must be at the core of their IT architecture.