Leading experts share their predictions

VILNIUS, LITHUANIA / ACCESSWIRE / January 24, 2022 / Data management professionals getting the central stage in business, focus on ethics increasing, pressure on Big Tech affecting the landscape of public web data industry - these will be among the most prominent trends in the big data industry in 2022, according to a public data gathering solutions provider, Oxylabs. Their experts predict what to expect in the year ahead.

Growing markets for external data

Tomas Montvilas, Chief Commercial Officer at Oxylabs, says that more industries will discover the benefits of using external data in the upcoming year. He lists a few:

"The market of SaaS products that use external data to provide insights for their clients will grow further in 2022. The successful IPOs of such companies like Semrush, Similarweb, Zoominfo and others are driving further investments in the field and we are likely to see more stars emerging," Tomas says.

Another important area he sees for the web scraping industry's growth is cybersecurity. Cyber threats are becoming more advanced and require new measures of defense. This is where web monitoring and scraping technologies come in.

"Constant monitoring of both public web and dark web can help identify malicious sites and programs early. It can also help catch data leaks sooner by finding data sets when they go for sale on the dark web, and recognize the actions of hacker groups. Meanwhile, proxies can serve well in email protection, by providing the ability to scan emails from different IP addresses," he explains.

Data management role in business further increasing

With the recent explosion in digitizing everything, data management and analytics became central roles in business. Data departments have been experiencing exponential growth during the past few years and the growth will continue well into 2022.

Gediminas Rickevičius, Vice President of Global Partnerships at Oxylabs notes that the increasing importance of data departments can be easily illustrated by budgeting trends. According to several recent surveys Oxylabs conducted in the UK's finance and ecommerce industries, most data departments are expecting to increase their budgets (51% ecommerce, 43% financial services).

Another trend Gediminas predicts for data departments will be the increasing outsourcing of automated public web data gathering tools. There will be several reasons for this. First of them being obvious - as companies become dependent on external data, manual data gathering processes are simply not sufficient. Another important factor is the current job market landscape.

"With "the great resignation" and lack of human resources being the dominant topics of 2021 it became even harder to find in-house professionals that could dedicate all their time for maintaining and adjusting web scraping infrastructure. Outsourcing this task allows optimizing resources and focusing on data analysis rather than acquisition," says Gediminas.

Pressure for Big Tech could affect web data industry

Recent years were marked with the growing pressure for Big Tech from governments around the world. 2022 will be no different - there will likely be push for new regulations, especially around personal data and its acquisition and aggregation.

According to Denas Grybauskas, Head of Legal at Oxylabs, the data gathering industry should not turn a blind eye on these processes. In light of the government pressure, some big tech companies might already be in the process of restricting access to public web data which could affect many businesses.

"Some companies are preparing for the old as life tactic - pointing fingers. That is what, at least in accordance with the leaked emails, Meta (Facebook) is planning to do in terms of personal data leaks and data scraping companies - to shift the attention from leaks by stating that personal data got out in the wild not due to Facebook's mistakes, but those of scrapers," Denas says.

Moving towards industry self-regulation

When it comes to strategic development of the data gathering industry, ethics and legal implications will remain the hot topic in 2022, pushing the industry to continue raising the standards. Ethical proxy acquisition and strong KYC practices will dominate the conversation, predicts Julius Černiauskas, CEO of Oxylabs.

He explains that as with most new technologies, web scraping is developing faster than the regulation that could safeguard it from potential misuse cases. Therefore, the industry itself has to take the lead in developing the self-regulation guidelines and standards for the proper use of technology.

"In 2022, the issue is set to become more mainstream for several reasons. First of all, as the largest industry players are setting the tone, smaller players are likely to follow. Secondly, brands that use proxy services are putting more emphasis on the nature of proxies too, as potential misuse could damage their reputation as well," says Julius.

About Oxylabs

Oxylabs is a leading global provider of premium proxies and data scraping solutions for large-scale web data extraction. The company's mission is clear: To give every business - whether big or small - access to big data. With unmatched hands-on experience in publicly available web data gathering, Oxylabs is in trusted partnerships with dozens of Fortune 500 companies and global businesses, helping them unearth hidden gems of business intelligence data through state-of-the-art products and technological expertise. For more information, please visit: https://oxylabs.io/.

Media Contact:

Vytautas Kirjazovas
Email: press@oxylabs.io
Website: www.oxylabs.io

SOURCE: Oxylabs