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 • IBM’s Watson cognitive platform is using tools like natural language processing and machine learning to help oncologists and US-based Memorial Sloan Kettering develop targeted and individualized cancer treatments. • A more prosaic use of facial recognition that is currently used on Disney cruises offers “enchanted art.” These are pictures that play animated scenes when a passenger walks by. The system uses facial recognition to ensure that on subsequent visits, the passenger doesn’t see the same scenario. • Most credit card companies like MasterCard routinely use artificial intelligence to help with fraud detection. This enables them to detect a fraudulent transaction in as little as 40–60 milliseconds. Data tagging, especially automated tagging, is an important aspect of using cognitive systems. Tagging, after all, applies identifiers to information to make it easy to sort, analyze, put in context, and create value. However, data tagging is in its early stages and needs industry standards, additional investment, better industry know-how, and more data scientists on the job (see Figure 14). Although not all data would be valued even if tagged, there still exists (and will continue to exist) a large gap between the actual amount of tagged data and the amount that could benefit from tagging. As Figure 14 shows, IDC estimates that by the end of 2025, only 15% of the data in the global datasphere will be tagged and only one-fifth of that will actually be analyzed. Figure 14. Data Tagging 40 35 30 25 20 Useful if Tagged Zettabytes15 Tagged 10 Analyzed 5 Touched by Cognitive Analytics 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 Source: IDC’s Data Age 2025 study, sponsored by Seagate, April 2017 IDC White Paper © 2017 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 20