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 streaming service — is many orders of magnitude smaller than the original streaming event. This approach represents an efficiency lesson taken from the previous decade of data growth. From the huge amount of data created we are prioritizing which data has sufficient value to be stored. Similarly, IoT devices are likely to generate a great deal of data without the need for long-term retention after analysis. Take the example of video surveillance cameras. Cameras create extremely rich data in the form of video. Typically, there will be a baseline of video capturing normal behavior that carries a very small retention requirement along with a subset of incidents that need to be available in the future. Among the data generated by a traffic camera, local transportation authorities value the video of traffic violations or abnormal traffic and can discard the regular, lawful flow of traffic after creating appropriate metadata. For a casino video surveillance system, casino operators value and retain only episodes of suspicious behavior, while the rest is safe to discard after creation of metadata and an appropriate period of time. In both of these examples, we see the application of smart criteria to which data to retain, in what form, and for how long. That way we can hang onto critical information without the need to store all the data produced. This sort of discerning data retention policy is a hallmark of current best practices in data retention. The result is that the quantity of data generation can and will continue to outpace any reasonable expectation of our ability to store all of the data. For example, it would take roughly 16 billion of today’s largest 12TB enterprise HDDs to store the 163ZB data expected to be created in 2025. To put that into perspective, over the past 20 years, the disk drive industry shipped 8 billion HDDs and nearly 4ZB of capacity. Of course, there will always exist ample opportunities to store more data, whether it is from unforeseen Big Data applications that result in more data tagging of the global datasphere or because of new data retention regulations that come into existence. Regardless, based on current expectations, data storage demands are poised to continue their aggressive growth with no end in sight. IDC expects that to keep up with Data Age 2025 projections, storage capacity shipments across all media types (HDD, flash, tape, optical, and DRAM) over the next 4 years (2017–2020) will have to surpass the 5.5ZB shipped across all media types over the past 10 years. In fact, IDC White Paper © 2017 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 15