The year 2020 was marked by unprecedented digital disruption, with the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating the shift towards digitization and data-driven decision-making. As a result, data management is becoming increasingly important for businesses, with petabyte-scale data management emerging as a mainstream trend in 2021. The growing centrality of digitization and data will continue to shape business success, consumer demand, and societal change in the coming year. Data privacy will also become a major competitive advantage, with several countries introducing new data privacy statutes or overhauling existing laws. Real-time analytics will become a differentiator for businesses that prioritize converged data platforms, which combine transactional, operational, and analytical workloads onto a single platform. However, embracing cloud adoption without proper planning can lead to increased risk and technical complexity.