For almost a decade now, global business leaders have heralded the beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which refers to how technologies like AI, robotics, IoT, autonomous vehicles and computer vision are blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. Industry 4.0 has paved the way for transformative changes in business, unleashing advances in business process automation in the front and back office, driving unprecedented productivity and growth.

The road to the data-driven enterprise is not for the faint of heart. The continuous waves of data pounding into ever-complex hybrid multicloud environments only compound the ongoing challenges of management, governance, security, skills, and rising costs, to name a few. But Hitachi Vantara has developed a path forward that combines cloud-ready infrastructure, cloud consulting and managed services to optimize applications for resiliency and performance, and automated dataops innovations.

Organizations today face challenges from rapidly changing markets, new technologies, and the need to build new modern apps running in a multicloud environment. For this reason, business leaders are demanding faster delivery of new applications, services, and insight, requiring greater agility and efficiency from IT. Enterprises, rightly so, are investing in modernizing their on-premises infrastructure with increased use of the cloud.

Although many enterprises are at varying stages in their cloud journeys, most are adopting distributed mixes of on-premises and public cloud environments in order to maintain certain data and applications close by, while making others more accessible and available online. With such distributed cloud networks, core tenants of the enterprise, such as management, scalability and security, become increasingly challenging. There is a path forward, however.

Electricity is fundamental to our society. As climate change becomes more severe and demand for clean energy increases, the future is the electrification of everything and along with it, the need for reliable energy. The U.S. infrastructure spans over a vast 200,000 miles and inspecting all of it is a time-consuming and high-risk process that often calls for hanging from helicopters or climbing tall towers. It is inefficient, costly, and dangerous.

Heading into a new year filled with myriad crosscurrents, this much is certain: more organizations will find smarter ways to use data as they realize the benefits of digitally transforming their operations. We’re seeing this trend toward data-driven decision making already play out in different industries around the world as companies modernize their infrastructures.

More than a decade into the Internet of Things (IoT) era, the immense potential of IoT is becoming real. We’re moving from proof of concepts and pilots to projects at scale. What’s become increasingly clear is the vast complexity of deploying IoT solutions at scale and the necessity to do so to become a data-driven business.

Digital transformations are fueling the equivalent of a global data gold rush. We know from leading analyst firms that 90% of all data was created in the last two years and it will grow by a factor of two over the next five years. This has resulted in a changed perception of business, one that requires a shift from conventional business models to those that leverage data to gain actionable insights to improve operations, enhances customer experience and accelerates revenue.

Organizations with the best Artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities are poised to deliver better customer outcomes, maximize revenue opportunities, and leave the competition behind. AI-driven insights can help companies achieve many business objectives such as improving customer loyalty, delivering effective training, reducing the impact of outages or providing better healthcare to patients. Applications are aplenty.

“Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.” The famous line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epic poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” has a fitting application to today’s data problem. Enterprises are deluged with data, but they often have no way to leverage it. According to most experts, only a small percentage of data is usable and made useful, and most of it is in the dark — thus the term, “dark data.”