Editorial: The Evolving Data Landscape
ArchitectingIT, Tuesday, April 15th, 2025
Forty years ago, pretty much all data resided in the walled garden of the mainframe, bar a few upstart midrange platforms. Most of that data was also human-generated and stored in traditional structured databases.
Today, the data landscape is more diverse than ever, creating both opportunities and challenges for businesses to manage their digital assets.
Background
The history of data has been tightly coupled with the evolution of technology platforms since the dawn of computing in the late 1940s. In the 1960s when mainframes ruled the world, for example, data was safely locked up in proprietary systems in corporate data centres. Although outsourcing existed (similar to today's cloud computing), the multi-tenant nature of mainframe systems allowed data to be kept secure for each customer.