Bob Yang, Vice President - Sales, Asia, Seagate Technology

Since 1978, Seagate has been creating precision engineered data storage technologies that deliver superior capacity, speed, safety, and performance. Bob is presently designated with Seagate Technology as Regional Vice President for Asia-Pacific Sales. At Seagate, he is responsible to lead the company's sales, marketing and technical support activities in the region.

Total worldwide data will swell to 163zb by 2025 - 10 times the amount today; ma­jority will be created and managed by enterprises. In re­sponse to a new study forecasting a 10-fold rise in worldwide data by 2025, global data and storage leader Seagate is advising business leaders and entrepreneurs to amplify their focus on the mega trends driving data growth over the next several years, and examine their business' course for the future value of data from creation, collection, utilization and management.

"While data creation in the previous 10 years has been characterized primarily by an increase in entertainment content, the coming decade will reflect the shift to productivity-driven and embedded data, as well as non-entertainment images and video such as surveillance and advertising"

The IDC white paper, Data Age 2025, sponsored by Seagate, pre­dicts data creation will swell to a to­tal of 163 zettabytes (ZB) by 2025; indicating that the decade centered around the conversion of analogue data to digital is being replaced by an era focused on the value of data; creating, utilizing, and managing ‘life critical’ data necessary for the smooth running of daily life for con­sumers, governments and business­es alike. Consumers and businesses creating, sharing and accessing data between any device and the cloud will continue to grow well beyond previous expectations.

Furthermore, whereas once con­sumers were the primary creators of the bulk of the world’s data, Data Age 2025 predicts this will shift, with enterprises creating 60 percent of the world’s data in 2025. Busi­ness leaders will have the oppor­tunity to embrace new and unique Business opportunities powered by this wealth of data and the insight it provides but will also need to make strategic choices on data collection, utilization and location.

Virtually every enterprise, the white paper indicates, is being af­fected by the major data-driving trends. Notable drivers of the shift from primarily consumer led to en­terprise-driven data include:

       •   The Evolution of Data from Business Background to Life-Criti­cal - By 2025, nearly 20 percent of the data in the global data sphere will be critical to our daily lives and nearly 10 percent of that will be hy­percritical.
       •   Embedded Systems and the In­ternet of Things (IoT) - By 2025, an average connected person anywhere in the world will interact with con­nected devices nearly 4,800 times per day - basically one interaction every 18 seconds.

• Machine Learning Changing the Landscape - IDC estimates that the amount of the global data sphere subject to data analysis will grow by a factor of 50 to 5.2 ZB in 2025.
• True Mobile and Real-time Data - By 2025, more than a quar­ter of data created will be real-time in nature, and IoT real-time data will constitute over 95 percent of it.

Automation and Machine-to- Machine Technologies Shifting the Bulk of Data Creation away from Traditional Sources - While data creation in the previous 10 years has been characterized primarily by an increase in entertainment content, the coming decade will reflect the shift to productivity-driven and em­bedded data, as well as non-enter­tainment images and video such as surveillance and advertising.

“While we can see from this new research that the era of Big Data is upon us, the value of data is really not in the ‘known’, but in the ‘unknown’ where we are vastly underestimating the potentials today. What is really exciting are the analytics, the new businesses, the new thinking and new ecosystems from industries like robotics and machine-to-machine learning, and their profound social and economic impact on our society,” Seagate CEO Steve Luczo said. “The opportunity for today’s enterprises and tomorrow’s entrepreneurs to capture the value of data is tremen­dous, and our global business lead­ers will be exploring these opportu­nities for decades to come.”

IDC SVP Dave Reinsel said: “From autonomous cars to intelligent per­sonal assistants, data is the lifeblood of a rapidly growing digital existence - opening up opportunities previ­ously unimagined by businesses.

Technology innovation will be vitally important to evaluate and fully ac­tivate the intricacies of what’s con­tained within this large volume of data - and storage in particular will continue to grow in importance, as it provides the foundation from which so many of these emerging technolo­gies will be served.”