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 All these embedded devices will radically increase the average person’s level of interaction with data, changing the user experience. This tendency is visible already in a platform like Facebook, which tunes content and ad streams based on each individual’s propensity to interact with specific types of content. The average rate per capita of data-driven interactions per day is expected to increase 20-fold in the next 10 years as our homes, workplaces, appliances, vehicles, wearables, and implants become data enabled (see Figure 8). Figure 8. Interactions per Connected Person per Day Number of interactions/capita/day 4,785 85 218 601 2010 2015 2020 2025 Source: IDC’s Data Age 2025 study, sponsored by Seagate, April 2017 Much of this interaction will fade into the background as intelligent assistants like the Amazon Echo and intelligence built into cars become part of the environment with which consumers habitually interact — increasing to one interaction every 18 seconds, on average. The ultimate impact of this explosion in data interactions will be profound and lead to irreversible changes in society and in the fabric and quality of the average person’s daily stream of life. Despite having a profound impact on daily life, the vast majority of the global datasphere is used and discarded rather than stored. This is primarily a reflection of the fact that most data is fundamentally disposable once it has been used or transferred. To go back to the earlier example of streaming video, there is no reason to store the content of each individual streaming session for the same program. Here is where metadata comes into play. The streaming service needs to retain merely the knowledge of that specific video-viewing event. This knowledge can be reasonably sophisticated, including when and for how long the show was paused or fast- forwarded and whether or not the viewer watched the full show and on which device (or devices). Nonetheless, this metadata — the set of data potentially useful to the IDC White Paper © 2017 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 14