A major part of the “digital revolution” revolves around the consumerization and digitization of our lives. This includes a variety of industries like healthcare, education, government, and corporate. Now, there are numbers and trends which will clearly indicate growth around cloud, virtualization, user mobility, and most of all – data. Consider this, IDC estimates that by 2025, nearly 20% of the data in the global datasphere will be critical to our daily lives and nearly 10% of that will be hypercritical. From there, solutions like cognitive systems will take this data and actually help us make it usable.
That same report from IDC estimates that the amount of the global datasphere subject to data analysis will grow by a factor of 50 to 5.2ZB in 2025; the amount of analyzed data that is “touched” by cognitive systems will grow by a factor of 100 to 1.4ZB in 2025!
When we look at things like AI, we need to understand that it really is an ‘umbrella’ term that’s made up of three components, the AI stack:
- Neural networks
- Machine learning
- Deep learning
New technologies around cognitive systems and artificial intelligence are already impacting organizations in a variety of industries. According to IDC, Widespread adoption of cognitive systems and artificial intelligence (AI) across a broad range of industries will drive worldwide revenues from nearly $8.0 billion in 2016 to more than $47 billion in 2020.
Let’s pause here and look at how all of this will impact the data center. 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. There, we learned quite a bit around what organizations are doing in terms of management their data centers. 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.