What’s the Next Step for the Data-Driven World? 2022 and Beyond

In this data-driven world, more and more enterprise leaders are engaging in using advanced solutions

Perhaps the most dramatic outcome of the digital revolution is the amount of data that is now collected and analyzed. IDC calculates that in 2010 the world created about two zettabytes (ZB) of digital information. If that were put into 1 GB thumb drives, laid end to end, it would make a line that could stretch across 184 million football fields. That sounds impressive until you consider that the World Economic Forum figures there will be 44 ZB collected in 2020.

This growth in data produced and collected is profound—and as COVID-19 has caused disruption to economies, businesses, and lives around the world, it has become more urgent to not only marvel at the scale of all this data but also to understand how it's being put to work.

A Look-back into the Data Landscape

The past decade's data explosion created a virtuous circle of data analysis and action, leading to new insights, data creation, and data analysis. We've seen companies collect more data than ever before as they've raced to transform their businesses and make data-driven decisions. This has spurred all kinds of personalized, connected objects, such as industrial machinery that saves money by signaling when it needs maintenance. And it has spurred services that combine digital information from traffic information, and social network graphs. It has also brought greater efficiency to things like supply chains and consumer marketing, to name just a couple of examples. This explosion also pushed other organizations to re-evaluate their strategies and look to cloud infrastructure to provide relief from legacy tools that could not keep up with the growing needs of the business.

Automation and the World of Security

The data analysis that's possible today can provide us with a new understanding of how to stay safe and how we, as a society, can perform better in the future. As all of us struggle with rapid changes, the ability to perform cheap, fast, and flexible analyses of the newest and most reliable information becomes even more critical to the way we work. Serverless and no-ops cloud deployments will continue to automate many kinds of computing infrastructure, allowing customers to focus on running their businesses instead of managing infrastructure. As businesses require more and more real-time decision-making, streaming data becomes paramount to make real-time business decisions. With the continued democratization of machine learning, which can now be accessed with as little as a cloud API or a pre-trained model, data analysts can quickly operationalize technology-driven initiatives that would have been prohibitively costly or time-consuming, just a few years ago. Additionally, scalable, flexible pricing and service options help more businesses analyze and react to a fast-changing world.

Image Data and A Look into The Future

By 2025, more than 50% of the data will be collected on the edge, on 41,6 billion IoT devices, including 6 billion smartphones. Much more will come from sensors, cameras, and the like. Of course, your smartwatch will also be on this list. On top of that, edge devices without an internet connection will be out there. The massive wave of image data available will not only bring the data but also technology to use this on a grand scale. Anyone will be able to do a lot of computation on images cheaply and easily, again changing the dynamics. It will probably bring OCR to a level where no paper documents will be flying around. At least that's what your customers & suppliers will expect. It will bring the identification of objects on images to a pretty close to a perfect level.