In 2012, we began losing our battle against data, as the amount of digital data being created, stored and shared reached new heights. At the same time, we witnessed a record build out of centralized infrastructure, as cloud vendors and enterprises built or expanded datacenters around the globe in an attempt to store and manage all this data. And the pace of both of these are only accelerating as we enter the new year.

This data escalation combined with the continued forces of consumerization and gamification of enterprise IT will lead to a clear mandate for CIOs and IT leaders in 2013:  take back control of corporate data. 

We will see a significant increase in investment around data management, particularly in data classification, storage, big data, and data protection.  IT will also start saying “no” to the many rogue cloud platforms, data sharing and collaboration services being used by employees …