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 problems and respond immediately and effectively. Some use of this data takes a more traditional approach (such as looking at a route’s on-time arrival record when planning any given aircraft’s allocation as a resource), but airlines use this data in real time more and more to adjust to contingencies as they arise. Increasingly, data usage is being analyzed by its level of criticality as indicated by factors such as the need for real-time processing and low latency, the ad hoc nature of usage, and the severity of consequences should the data become unavailable (e.g., a medical application is considered to be more consequential than a streaming TV program). IDC estimates that by 2025, nearly 20% of the data in the datasphere will be critical to our lives and 10% of that will be hypercritical (see Figure 5). It’s one thing to lose a spreadsheet because of a PC crash; it’s another to cause physical harm because of errant data in a self-driving car. These events are not about business reputations but instead about business existence. The emergence of hypercritical data must compel businesses to develop and deploy data capture, analytics, and infrastructure that delivers extremely high reliability, bandwidth, and availability; more secure systems; new business practices; and even new legal infrastructures to mitigate exposure to shifting and potentially debilitating liabilities. Figure 5. Data Criticality Over Time 70 60 50 40 30 Zettabytes Potentially Critical 20 10 Critical Hyper-Critical 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 Data Type CAGR 2015 to 2025 All Data. Includes all data in the global datasphere. 30% Potentially critical. Data that may be necessary for the continued, convenient 37% operation of users’ daily lives Critical. Data known to be necessary for the expected continuity of users’ daily lives. 39% Hypercritical. Data with direct and immediate impact on the health and well- 54% being of users. (Examples include commercial air travel, medical applications, control systems, and telemetry. This category is heavy in metadata and data from embedded systems.) Source: IDC’s Data Age 2025 study, sponsored by Seagate, April 2017 IDC White Paper © 2017 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 10