According to the IDC, the sum of the world’s data – the Datasphere — will grow from 33 zettabytes in 2018 to a mind-boggling 175ZB by 2025.

In their latest “Data Age 2025” whitepaper, IDC defines the Datasphere as being composed of three locations. The “core” includes traditional and cloud data centers. The “edge” includes enterprise-hardened infrastructure, like cell towers and branch offices. Finally, there are “endpoints,” which include PCs, smart phones, and IoT devices. The whitepaper describes the way the Datasphere elements are going to change in the near future.

IDC projects that people will continue to store the majority on data on traditional spinning hard disk drives (HDD) and solid state drives (SSDs). Super-fast memory-like NVM-NAND technology is projected to grow quickly in the coming years as prices come down, and IDC also sees “NVM-Other” starting to emerge in 2023.

According to IDC, by 2024, the amount of data stored in the core will be more than double the amount stored in the endpoint. Edge storage will also see significant growth as latency-sensitive services and applications proliferate throughout the world. Public cloud services such as AWS, Azure, and GCP will account for the lion’s share of that storage growth, and much of the DataSphere will end up on the cloud.

49% of data will be stored in public cloud environments by 2025 By 2020, the public cloud will have more data stored than in consumer devices, and by 2021, the cloud will have more data than in traditional data centers. 49% of data will be stored in public cloud environments by 2025.

Nearly 30% of the data generated will be consumed in real-time by 2025 The shift to “real time” data (as opposed to data describing something that occurred in the past) is another phenomenon that will start to accelerate in the coming years. According to IDC, the average person will have nearly 5,000 digital interactions per day by 2025, up from 700 today.

“The emerging data landscape is massive and changing extraordinarily fast,” IDC concludes. “Companies looking to be relevant between now and 2025 will need to understand the role data plays in their organization and how the Datasphere will evolve during that period. They will need to embrace their role as data guardians, leverage the cloud, and take a global approach to their data.”

Image: Pete Linforth

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