Data Age 2025: The Evolution of Data to Life-Critical Don’t Focus on Big Data; Focus on the Data That’s Big Sponsored by Seagate The lessons embodied in the forecast and analysis of our data-driven world include the following: • As data becomes more life critical, business critical, real time, and mobile, the entities that manage and store it will need to develop measured approaches to increasing reliability, lowering latency, and increasing security. This process may start with audits but will need to be backed up with investment, coherent strategies, and top-notch IT talent. • The migration of analytics from a post-activity event to a real-time and predictive enterprise will demand a step-function increase in the use of analytics for evidence-based decision making. This means not just digital transformation of an organization’s processes but also the culture and organizational structure of the organization. Analytics will become a competitive advantage. • The security and privacy challenges cannot be underplayed. Data breaches can put companies out of business, targeted attacks can halt operations, and hacking can compromise trade secrets. The business, IT, and security professionals in an organization must continually emphasize throughout the organization that security is not simply an IT technical problem with a purely technical solution. Rather, it is an organizational need requiring the participation of employees at all levels. • The IoT will drive — or force — merged operations between the business leaders and IT departments accustomed to supporting back-office and financial functions and those that run operational systems — labs, operating rooms, factory floors, electrical grids, cable headends, and so forth — as all digital activity migrates to IP networks. Since IoT is one of the fundamental technology pillars of business improvement in the decades to come, optimized use of associated data is one of the key drivers of business success starting today. Leadership and technical integration will be critical to making the best use of IoT technology or at least avoiding chaos. • The aggregate effect of the trends driving the global datasphere to new zettabyte levels is to make digital transformation an all-hands-on-deck effort for organizations to navigate the next decade successfully. It will also drive increasing reliance on third parties, from cloud providers and software firms to the baseline technology suppliers. Thus vendor selection will better be seen as a leadership function and partnering function rather than a procurement function. The organization will depend on it. IDC White Paper © 2017 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 24