Big Data LDN returned to London last week. Since launching in 2016, the conference’s overall attendance has tripled to over 8,000 people, making it one of the largest big data events in Europe. Over the two days, attendees heard from over 150 data experts and visionaries on a wide variety of big data topics.
The Pepperdata team were there to meet with enterprise organizations, hear about their analytics infrastructure performance challenges, and talk about how our performance management solutions can help enterprises to optimize their infrastructure and apps.
As we do at most events, we had a blast at Big Data LDN. Reflecting during the flight home, we landed on three key observations that we took away from the event:
Data privacy and ethics are a hot topic
At the conference, there was a lot of discussion about how countries, lawmakers and businesses should navigate the future in a world defined by data. A lot of the conversation centered around the European Union’s globally applicable General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the gold standard for data protection. Poised to resound far beyond Europe, GDPR has set a global benchmark for data protection standards. As more countries around the world are adopting GDPR-like standards, it will be interesting to see whether GDPR inevitably becomes the world standard and what new global business challenges will be created as a result.
Big data-driven businesses face common analytics performance management challenges
From conference discussions, it was clear that many organizations are managing large clusters with very little insight into how infrastructure resources are being consumed, or how to manage and optimize performance within a multi-tenant distributed system. Though they are spread across different verticals, these organizations are asking the same questions: Is someone hogging all the resources? Why is my app running slower today? They know that bridging this gap in understanding and being able to optimize their analytics infrastructure, is critical to their success.
Migrating to the cloud is easy and inexpensive – said no big data company ever
For most organizations, the cloud has quickly transformed from a market disruptor to an essential IT strategy. However, many of these organizations need help, because migrating to the cloud is hard. Migration pitfalls can quickly escalate costs and derail digital transformation efforts. Whether companies were completely cloud-native, hybrid cloud, or taking baby steps toward managing data in the cloud, cloud strategy and cloud migration are top priorities.