Digital data growth is already an ongoing challenge for many enterprise organizations across the globe. That said, the global pandemic has accelerated the digital data deluge, with a surge in video-based content, and other emerging trends that will fuel additional growth in 2020 and 2021.
More than 59 zettabytes (ZB) of data will be created, captured, copied, and consumed in the world this year, according to the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC).
The COVID-19 pandemic is contributing to this growth by causing an increase in the number of remote employees, and that's fueled more adoption of video conferencing applications and a significant increase in streaming video webcasts or events.
Digital Data Analytics Market Development
IDC measures the amount of data created and consumed in the world each year. The ratio of unique data (created and captured) to replicated data (copied and consumed) is roughly 1:9 -- but the trend is a slow migration toward less unique and more replicated data.
By 2024, IDC expects this ratio to be 1:10. While the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the creation of new unique data, the increased consumption of replicated data has fueled the continued growth of what IDC calls the 'Global DataSphere'.
This growth is forecast to continue through 2024 with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26 percent.
"Growth of the Global DataSphere is driven more by the data that we consume and analyze than what we create," said David Reinsel, senior vice president at IDC.
According to the IDC assessment, the recursion rate of data -- the rate at which the same data is processed again -- continues to grow exponentially driving the 'unique' DataSphere down to 10 percent of the total DataSphere.
Key findings from the IDC market study include:
The amount of data created over the next three years will be more than the data created over the past 30 years, and the world will create more than three times the data over the next five years than it did in the previous five.
Productivity or embedded data is the fastest-growing category of data created with a 40.3 percent CAGR for the 2019–2024 forecast period. By 2024, entertainment data will be 40 percent of the Global DataSphere and productivity or embedded data will be 29 percent.
Sensors are being embedded in a variety of devices that produce new data that can help contextualize data. This data along with increasing amounts of metadata (data about data) is growing exponentially and soon will surpass all other data types.
IDC analysts believe that the consumer share of the Global DataSphere will hover around 50 percent and decline roughly 4 percent over the next five years, slowly ceding share to the enterprise DataSphere.
Video surveillance data privacy requirements and regulatory initiatives or mandates continue to intersect with one another. IDC analysts believe that achieving the best balance between security, personalization, efficiency, and individual rights to privacy will produce great tensions.
Outlook for Digital Data Consumption Growth
IDC says that we're now in a video-enabled and video-assisted world, and we will consume an increasing amount of digital video each year -- these are key factors driving the growth trajectory of the Global DataSphere.
At the same time, we're making more productive use of the digital video data we capture, which is contributing to the growth of productivity data in the DataSphere. Moreover, I believe that remote work, video meetings and online events will create lots of data that can be analyzed and reported.
Enterprise video meetings and commercial event analytics will be an essential tool for organizations that seek to learn more about the benefits of their shift to online interaction and collaboration. We're entering a new era where optimizing the productivity of an organization's remote workforce will be a high priority for the C-suite.
