There Are Zettabytes of Data in the World. So What?
Welcome to the Cloud Database Report. Data has the potential to shed light on everything—but only if we are able to extract meaning from it. How do we do that?
Healthcare, business, finance, science, sports, the environment. In every industry and part of life, we store and analyze data, make data-driven decisions, and use data to predict what will happen next.
IDC estimates that 64.2 zetabytes of data were created or replicated worldwide in 2020, yet less than 2 percent of that data was saved. The rest is ephemeral—like a puff of smoke.
And even the tiny percentage of data that we do retain is not well managed or understood. Businesses struggle to centralize, manage, and share the terabytes (trillion bytes), petabytes (quadrillion bytes), and exabytes (quintillion bytes) of data that run through their systems.
Data management is a monumental challenge, yet an even bigger opportunity. Successful businesses across industries use data and analytics for competitive advantage. Data science has become one of the most sought-after skills, and data will fuel the next wave of innovation. AI and machine learning are wholly dependent on good data and lots of it.
Data is growing 1000x
This is what Cloud Database Report is all about—data growth, management, analysis, sharing, governance, privacy, security, and insights.
Data volumes are booming, growing 10x, 100x, 1000x. And the database market is racing to keep up. AWS, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and other vendors are delivering new databases for a wide variety of data types—graph, time-series, vector, search, document, etc.—and offering fully-managed cloud services that ease the complexity of administration. I think of it simply as modern data management.
The technologies are important, but the use cases are what it’s all about. Personalization, transactions, customer relationship management, business intelligence, and much more. Cloud Database Report digs into these use cases from the points of view of both consumers and businesses. Topics covered:
Technologies for modern data management
Data science and analytics
Databases growing by 1000X
How to move and share data
Data privacy, security, governance
Strategies for realizing the value of data
Three axioms
I have had a front row seat to the data industry for more than 25 years, as a tech journalist with InformationWeek, then as a communications strategist at Oracle, IBM, and MongoDB. Now, I write the Cloud Database Report.
A few things have remained constant over the years.
Data keeps growing and becoming more complex.
Businesses recognize there is tremendous value in data, if only they can capitalize on it.
Data security & governance are paramount—and mistakes are costly.
Those axioms don’t change. Yet the pace of innovation and our never-ending search for insights drive constant change in the world of booming data.
In the not-too-distant future, the world will move beyond zettabytes to yottabytes—1,000 times more!
Subscribe to the Cloud Database Report to keep up with this exponential growth.
