Almost half (49 percent) of the world’s stored data could reside in public cloud environments by 2025, and the shift is largely being driven by a world filled with IoT sensors that are constantly capturing, recording, and analyzing data in business environments.
This is among the findings discussed by an IDC white paper, “The Digitization of the World – From Edge to Core,” sponsored by data and storage provider Seagate Technology, which examines the impending shifts to the global data model.
The report mentioned that more than 5 billion consumers now interact with data every day. And this is expected to rise to 6 billion or 75 percent of the world’s population by 2025.
“In 2025, each connected person will have at least one data interaction every 18 seconds. Many of these interactions are because of the billions of IoT devices connected across the globe, which are expected to create over 90ZB of data in 2025," the report noted.
With businesses looking to centralize data management and delivery, there is an increased reliance on the connectivity, performance, and convenience that cloud services provide, according to the study.
And as companies continue to pursue the cloud for increasing data processing and storage needs, cloud data centers are becoming the new enterprise data repository.
“In essence, the cloud is becoming the new core,” it said.
David Reinsel, senior vice president at IDC, said that while endpoints continue to be the primary location for data creation in the short term, the fastest growth is forecasted to happen at the core and the edge — with more data stored in the core than in the world’s endpoints by 2025.
“This will be particularly true for major industries as edge computing continues to be a key driver of business-critical factors and digital transformation,” he added.
The IDC study used the Data Readiness Condition Index (DATCON) for the first time to assesses data-readiness of the four critical industries — healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and media and entertainment.
DATCON scores are calculated across a number of metrics, including data growth, criticality, security, investment, management, skills and C-level involvement.
The study showed that manufacturing and financial services scored the best overall at 3.3 each, representing the greatest use of edge computing in the four industries.
Healthcare is in third place with a score of 2.4. However, the study noted that it has a wide room for improvement as it is the fastest-growing.
Media and entertainment received the lowest DATCON score of 2.0, “showing the sector ripe for advanced data technologies; particularly in data security and data management.”
“While some industries are more prepared for digital transformation than others, all businesses need to be ready to act on a solid digital strategy in order to be successful in the data age,” said Dave Mosley, Seagate’s chief executive officer.
