2019 industry trend predictions for Asia Pacifia

2018 was a year of fundamental change. Underpinning this was the impact of data management and analytics, and of course GDPR. In my opinion, the six key areas and trends that would shape technology in Asia Pacific in 2019 are:

1. IoT  

By 2020, there will 8.6 billion connected things in Asia Pacific, which presents a US$583 billion market opportunity.

To capture that opportunity, organizations will need the ability to acquire data from disparate systems (i.e. IoT devices) and align it on common ontologies so that data can be trusted and utilized.

As artificial intelligence and machine learning evolve, allowing these capabilities to organize the data, attribute it from a universe of observations, and produce auto-didactic insights, will create opportunities not yet imagined.

In 2019, we will see further use cases of IoT in home spaces, smart cities and more industrial use cases in automation or autonomous vehicles. This will be partially fuelled by the pilot projects that will take place in 26 cities in ASEAN, as part of the region’s efforts to accelerate smart city development.

Since such efforts result in the formation of technology ecosystems, it is crucial to have a holistic view of data across the cloud to the edge to maximize the benefit of the data used across these ecosystems.

2. GDPR

Despite its benefits, cloud presents two major challenges to organizations: it increases the possibility of data leaks, and makes it difficult to determine the applicable privacy law as it is not always clear where data in the cloud is physically stored.

With the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) being enforced in May this year, it is now important for organizations to ensure that the cloud services they use are compliant and that the systems and applications they design do not expose risk.

Although the GDPR isn’t a global regulation, it also affects organizations located outside of Europe as long as they collect and store personal data of European citizens. Already, Cloudera customers and organizations that would not be subject to GDPR are taking it as their starting point for their own personal data privacy and protection guidelines. This is in addition to their efforts to comply with their country-specific privacy regulations such as Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Act and Australia’s Privacy Act 1998.

Expanding GDPR to become a global regulation is a certainly a potential further evolution. For it to become a truly global regulation though, it will first need to prove its worth in its current form; once that has progressed well and has proven workable, the chances of it influencing international practice will be much higher.

3. Healthcare

Healthcare institutions in Asia are increasingly adopting digital tools – such as electronic health records and connected medical devices – to provide patients with more efficient and personalized services. Those that have embarked on digital transformation have reported business improvements of up 21 percent.

As healthcare becomes digitalized, the world is expected to generate more than 2,314 exabytes of healthcare data by 2020. However, 80% of those data will come in unstructured formats, which might prevent clinicians, doctors, nurses and surgeons from gaining an incredible amount of insight to understand their patients better.

To effectively extract actionable insights from the massive volume of data coming at us, healthcare organizations will need to develop, deploy, and integrate machine learning and AI into clinical workflow and care delivery.

Having the proper infrastructure with the required storage and processing capacity will be expected in order to efficiently design, train, execute, and deploy machine learning and AI solutions.

Recognizing this, Asia’s healthcare industry is expected to spend US$86.7 million by the end of 2018 to create the right environment for AI to help improve their diagnosis and treatment systems.