Over the past few years, a major trend has been emerging among pretty much every industry out there. I’m sure you’ve heard of the ‘digital revolution.’ However, at the heart of this movement is data. In fact, we are actively in the midst of another ‘industrial revolution’ as we enter the age of the data-driven economy.
Today, we’re all walking, talking, data-generating engines. Cisco recently reported that, driven by the Internet of Things, the total amount of data created (and not necessarily stored) by any device will reach 847 ZB per year by 2021. As they point out, data created is two orders of magnitude higher than data stored.
But think about what that’s done to services, our data centers, and the technologies we’ve been using. All of this is changing the way we leverage core resources and delivery new types of services to the market. According to IDC, by 2025 the global datasphere will grow to 163 zettabytes (that is a trillion gigabytes). That’s also ten times the 16.1ZB of data generated in 2016. Here’s the other reality with everything technology-related we do on a daily basis. By 2025, an average connected person anywhere in the world will interact with connected devices nearly 4,800 times per day — basically one interaction every 18 seconds.
Here’s the other major point to remember… the data center has absolutely taken notice around this. Over the past few years, I’ve had the honor (and pleasure) of co-authoring and helping design the AFCOM State of the Data Center report. In fact, a new report will be coming out and showcased at this year’s AFCOM Data Center World in 2019.
In that study, we asked what data center leaders were doing when it came to leveraging new and innovative solutions. Remember, these solutions are aimed at improving data center efficiency while still delivering new capabilities to the customer. We found four solutions are leading the charge with Data Analytics and Big Data as the top two. In fact, 52% of respondents indicated that they’re already leveraging data analytics and another 42% said they’re already using big data.