Connected devices demand data here and now.

The evolution of mobile technology has enabled us to access our digital world, be it personal or enterprise, whenever we want and, increasingly with the advent of wearables and other connected devices, wherever we want.

Retro-cool

Smartphones and tablets have been with us for a surprisingly short time.  I bought my first smartphone a little over 5 years ago; before that I had a succession of PDAs going back to the first generation Palm Pilot back in the mid-1990s. But while the PDA experience was largely a disconnected one. The smartphone as we now know it has been with us for barely a decade and in that time our expectations for what such devices can deliver have grown.

Now we each have in our pockets a device which enables us to access everything from last night's television to the most sensitive of corporate data.  All available on one screen via a few swipes and taps.

I'm old enough to remember the 14.4k modem which came with my old Palm Pilot (which, by the way, still works perfectly). It was perfectly normal to wait minutes for emails to find their way over the landline connection, and beyond that there wasn't really a great deal of data to ship around. But today's generation smart devices bring with them an expectation. If I can't pull up what I want instantaneously, I lose patience and then, rapidly, interest.

Being "always on" brings an expectation that data be instantly accessible. The end-user cares not that the content our apps have to manage comes from a variety of sources, enterprise, cloud and device-sourced. The key is to enable our systems to seamlessly manage every one of those sources to deliver a real-time experience. And that's a challenge of significant proportions.

Today's apps must source the data required from multiple sources, process and analyse it and deliver the required content or insight. And they need to do it seamlessly and instantaneously. Database as a Service (DBaaS) offerings like Cloudant are already delivering on that promise, DBaaS enables instant provisioning of the data layer, together with guaranteed levels of data layer performance and up time.

“A good data layer is one that you barely notice is there, and working with the big data experts at Cloudant has made that a reality for all our Big Win Sports titles.”

Joel DeYoung, Director of Technology, Hothead Games

In a world where we want data wherever, whenever mobile devices and every layer therein increasingly have to respond with HERE and NOW. Can your systems do that? With DBaaS, they could.