The Future of Big Data and IT Infrastructure

Big Data has firmly entered the zeitgeist, but what this means for the future of IT and technology is still up for debate. IDC’s Digital Universe report has analysed current trends, to anticipate the future of data in 2020.

The scale of data is unprecedented, with the ‘digital universe’ (all the data created replicated and consumed) doubling in size every two years – from 2005 to 2020, the digital universe will expand from 130 exabytes to 40,000 exabytes.

At the same time, spending on IT infrastructure to support this increased volume of data will grow by 40% between 2012 and 2020, this means that investment per gigabyte is reduced by a factor of 10, from $2.00 to $0.20.

The importance of the cloud will also increase, by 2020, around 40% of data will have been ‘touched by the cloud’, and investment in cloud computing will increase proportionately faster than most IT infrastructure. The IDC assess that the two largest types of information in the cloud will be entertainment (46.7%) and surveillance (35.1%).

The value of big data is also underexploited, with up to 33% of data having analytic value which has not been attempted. On the flip side, the lack of standards, or standards not being implemented properly around information security has the potential to put private information at risk.

Whilst any predictions about the future of IT must be taken with a pinch of salt, there is little doubt about the inexoriable increase in Big Data, however the form and value that this will take is still unknown.