The COVID pandemic has made evident the need to accelerate the delivery of useful and trusted data to business decision-makers. Conventional analytics architectures can take weeks or even months to react to new types of data requests in today's complex data environments. That is why many companies are turning to more agile data integration technologies, like data virtualisation, which can shorten these times drastically. In 2021, we will see how this trend is consolidated as a comprehensive data strategy. Many companies will implement data fabrics - an architectural pattern which prioritises agility in the delivery of trusted, real-time data to the business. In addition, AI technology will be further incorporated in data fabric architectures to automate steps such as data discovery, performance optimisation and workload management. This will further increase automation and agility by leveraging the maturity reached by AI technology in the last few years.  Read Less