Big data is no longer just a buzzword but a strong industry projected to be worth $103 billion by 2023.

We live and breathe data, and our pace of data generation won’t be slowing down anytime soon. According to a source, the average person will generate about 1.7 megabytes of data per second by 2021.

Seeing how important big data is to the day-to-day efficiency of both individuals and organizations, it is important to know what the top trends are.

Here are five key big data trends you should watch out for in 2021:

1. Augmented Analytics Will Become More Mainstream

If you’re optimistic about the future of big data, you should familiarize yourself with augmented analytics.

One of the major challenges that have come with the rise of big data is dealing with the sheer amount of data now available. With sources indicating that we generate an estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily and that we will be generating a whopping 463 exabytes of data just five years from now (roughly 185 times more data!), datasets have grown so big that handling and interpreting them is now a major challenge.

Augmented analytics solves this problem by using ML and AI techniques to automate the preparation, sharing, and analysis of data, essentially transforming bigger, seemingly unusable data into smaller, usable datasets.

Augmented analytics will undoubtedly start to become mainstream in 2021. Already, Mordor Intelligence has projected that the Augmented Analytics Market will have a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 31.2 percent until 2025, while research from Gartner shows that augmented analytics will become a dominant driver in Business Intelligence (BI) in 2021.

2. Major Marriages of Big Data and Blockchain

Recently, there has been a lot of renewed interest in cryptocurrencies, and blockchain technology by extension, thanks to the meteoric rise of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Now, while we could look at the renewed interest in cryptocurrency from an isolated lens, we could also look at it from an angle of how big data stands to benefit: big data will rise on the wave of increased crypto awareness and adoption, resulting in major marriages of big data and blockchain by some of the world’s biggest brands.

The marriage of big data and blockchain ensures:

• Big data security due to a network architecture that is difficult to counterfeit or change.

• Better data structure that makes it possible to analyse and make meaning of data.

In essence, a marriage between blockchain and big data makes it both easy to read and secure data; a lot of data security nightmares will be gone.

3. Increased Focus on Knowledge Graphs

According to Gartner, Knowledge Graphs are among the top five emerging technology trends that will bridge the gap between human and machine.

As big data continues to expand, this data becomes increasingly difficult to analyze and make sense of. 

This is where knowledge graphs come in.

Knowledge Graphs are a collection of interlinked descriptions of objects, concepts, and events that helps create a better context for data through linking and semantic metadata. This allows easy analysis, integration, sharing, and unification of data.

Represented in Resource Description Framework (RDF), Knowledge Graphs provide a framework that allows easy representation of various types of data, is interoperable and is standardized.

A few use cases of Knowledge Graphs, according to Dataversity, include:

• Helping to capture data assets across a lot of different concepts.

• Harmonizing captured data and standardizing data classifications.

• Showing relationships by unifying captured data.

In simple terms, using Knowledge Graphs would simplify usage and analysis of big data by helping capture lots of different datasets, harmonizing them, and presenting them in a way that is easy to make meaning of.

4. A Big Data-Fueled Health Revolution

A health revolution fueled by big data is on the horizon, and we could start to see it in action as early as 2021.

While health technology continues to advance, the year 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, have highlighted the need to take a different approach to solving health problems.

Big data is being increasingly used to try to find solutions to health challenges, and we’re starting to see the results of these efforts.

Just recently, Deepmind, Google’s deep-learning program, made a huge leap that could revolutionize healthcare for a very long time:

Through its AlphaFold program, it was able to solve one of biology’s biggest challenges: it successfully determined the 3D shapes of proteins from their amino-acid sequence -- outperforming about 100 other teams to solve a 50-year-old biology problem, decades before scientists expected a solution.

Deepmind’s AlphaFold was able to solve this problem decades ahead of schedule thanks to big data: trained by feeding it a databank of approximately 170,000 protein structures, AlphaFold was fed the protein structure challenge, which it solved with a lot more accuracy than anticipated.

The implication is a medical breakthrough that could bring about groundbreaking solutions to how drugs are made and possibly lead to solutions to cancer, dementia, infectious diseases, and more.

5. More Reliance on Big Data to Address Climate Change

Climate change has consistently ranked as one of the world’s top problems, with the United Nations ranking it as the number one challenge in the world in 2020.

Climate change continues to be a major challenge due to the strong link between actions that cause climate change and the economic benefits derived from these actions. 

While several actions have been taken in the past, 2021 is likely to result in more focus on the use of data to combat climate change.

Big data analytics can be used to collect real-time data to both understand the response to climate change and discussions resulting from climate actions, thereby making it easy to better combat climate change.

Also, investors and consumers have very little information about commodities they are using, which makes it difficult for a climate-conscious consumer to understand how the production process of certain products contributes to climate change -- an understanding of which can help influence the choice of which product to support. 

In Conclusion

We’ve barely scratched the surface of what big data is capable of. In 2021, you can expect to see more practical applications of big data to solve some of the human race’s biggest problems. The above are five big data trends you should pay close attention to in 2021.