Data is important to driving analytics and predictions in business.
However, analysts at IDC say less of the data being created by organizations is being saved each year, meaning the corpus isn’t as broad and robust as it should be.
That’s a problem, according to IDC. The world should save more data to build up more “digital resilience,” which IDC defines as the ability to rapidly adapt to business disruptions.
Also, companies use data to develop innovations for the future. “Companies are quickly discovering that data not only helps affirm the direction they are heading but also creates opportunities to launch new revenue streams,” IDC said in a recent report.
And, companies use data to monitor the pulse of employees, partners and customers for keen insights.
Without naming any companies, IDC said many of them believe there is “latent, potentially unmined value” from analyzing older data. However, the cost of storing more data holds companies back from adjusting their policies to retain data longer, IDC said.
This hesitancy is expected to continue until organizations show a positive return on investment from data analytics efforts, especially with older data. Proven ROI on analytics initiatives would help buttress the need for store more data and keeping it longer.
IDC said less than 2% of data created in 2020 was saved and retained into 2021. There was unusually high growth in 2020 due to a dramatic increase in work and learning from home. IDC tabulated that 64 zettabytes of data was created or replicated in 2020. Also, the amount of digital data created over the next five years will be greater than twice the amount of data created since the start of digital storage technology. (A zettabyte is 2 to the 70th power of bytes. One billion, one terabyte drives would be need to store one zettabyte of data.)
Data creation and replication will grow annually at 23% each year until 2025, IDC said.
The fastest growing segment of data generation is from IoT devices, not including video surveillance cameras. And, data created at the edge is growing almost as fast as in the cloud, according to IDC.
One of the biggest challenges cities face in organizing smart city projects is how to ingest data from IoT devices used in traffic management and other settings, according to city administrators in a recent Fierce Electronics roundtable.
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