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 From Business Background to Life-Critical Contemporary society generates, uses, and retains amounts of data that would be considered huge — if not unimaginable — by any earlier standard. Yet IDC expects the size of the global datasphere to continue to grow in the coming few years and eclipse what exists today. IDC estimates that in 2025, the world will create and replicate 163ZB of data, representing a tenfold increase from the amount of data created in 2016.This hypergrowth is the outcome of an evolution of computing that goes back decades. As shown in Figure 1, IDC categorizes the creation and use of compute data broadly into three main eras: • 1st Platform (Before 1980). Data resided almost exclusively in purpose- built datacenters before 1980. Even when people accessed data from remote terminals, the terminals were dumb machines with little, if any, computing power. The data and processing ability remained centralized in mainframes. The purpose of data generation and use was almost entirely business focused. • 2nd Platform (1980 to 2000). The rise of the personal computer and the might of Moore’s law enabled a more democratic distribution of data and computing power. Datacenters evolved from mere data containers to become centralized hubs that managed and distributed data across a slow but developing network to end devices. These devices gained the ability to store and manage data for purely personal use by consumers, and a digital entertainment industry of music, movies, and games emerged. • 3rd Platform (2000 to today). The proliferation of wireless broadband and fast networks encouraged data’s movement into the cloud, decoupling data from specific physical devices and ushering in the era of accessing data from any screen. Datacenters expanded into cloud infrastructure through popular services from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others. The distribution of computing power continued with the rise of new device types such as phones, wearables, and gaming consoles. Endpoint devices such as these and traditional PCs still require data to operate, but the necessary data is easily accessible through the cloud, requiring less and less local storage. These trends drive and, in turn, are driven by the increased importance of computing in B2B, B2C, and social interaction. IDC White Paper © 2017 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 5