Big data, online security to become mainstream in 2016: Oracle

The new year will see more banks, insurers and credit-rating firms across the globe turning to enhanced security measures to guard against online fraud more effectively, global software and cloud major Oracle has predicted.

"(The year) 2016 will witness an increase in the proliferation of experiments default risk, policy underwriting, and fraud detection as firms try to identify hotspots for algorithmic advantage faster than the competition," the leading US-based cloud service provider said in its outlook for 2016 on Monday.

The professional data scientists will see increasing demand for their skills from established companies including in India, it added.

Oracle has 12 development centres in India, including facilities in many emerging cities like Vijayawada, Thiruvananthapuram, Noida and Ahmedabad.

"(The year) 2016 will be the year when big data becomes more mainstream and is adopted across various sectors to drive innovation and capture digitization opportunities," said Neil Mendelson, vice president, Oracle's big data product management, in a statement.

"We will also see the emergence of dataflow programming which provides simpler reusability of functional operators and gives pluggable support for statistical and machine learning functions," the 2016 outlook added.

In 2016, simpler big data discovery tools will let business analysts shop for datasets in enterprise "Hadoop" clusters, reshape them into new mashup combinations and even analyse them with exploratory machine learning technique.

"This will improve both self-service access to big data and provide richer hypotheses and experiments that drive the next level of innovation," the company said.

In 2016, organisations will witness technologies mature and become more mainstream thanks to cloud services and appliances with pre-configured automation and standardisation.

"Companies will not only capture a greater variety of data in 2016, they use this in a variety of algorithms, analytics and apps," it noted.

2016 will be the year where Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Property Graphs (PG) will be applied to ordinary data processing challenges.

"The new shift will include widespread applications of these technologies in IT tools that support applications, real-time analytics and data science," the outlook stated.

Increasing consumer awareness of the ways data can be collected, shared, stored and stolen will amplify calls for regulatory protections of personal information in next year.

"The continuous threat of ever more sophisticated hackers will prompt companies to both tighten security, as well as audit access and use of data," the outlook report predicted.

India is home to Oracle's second largest workforce of developers and engineers and accounts for its largest research and development investment outside the US.