Doha: The digital universe in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) will grow from 249 exabytes in 2014 to 1835 exabytes by 2020, an increase of over 600 percent, a study by the EMC Corporation has revealed.
The global study titled “The Digital Universe of Opportunities: Rich Data and the Increasing Value of the Internet of Things,” shows how the emergence of wireless technologies, smart products and software-defined businesses are playing a central role in the surging volume of the world’s data. The EMC’s is the only study to quantify and forecast the amount of data produced annually.
The study found that in 2013, 60 percent of data in the digital universe was attributed to mature markets such as Germany, Japan, and the US, but emerging markets including the Middle East and North Africa, Brazil, China, India, Mexico and Russia will surpass the mature markets by 2017. The Mena region alone will rise from 3.8 percent of the worldwide digital universe to 4.2 percent in 2020.
Also, the billions of connected devices equipped with unique identifiers and the ability to automatically record, report and receive data, currently represent 2 percent of the Mena’s data and is expected to contribute to over 8 percent by 2020.
According to analysts, organisations in the Mena region now need to take steady steps to identify and define “useful data” or data that could be analysed — in the digital universe. In 2013, only 22 percent of the information in the worldwide digital universe was considered useful data, but less than 5 percent of the useful data was actually analysed — leaving a massive amount of data lost as dark matter in the digital universe. By 2020, more than 35 percent of all data in the world could be considered useful data, thanks to the growth of data from the Internet of Things, but it will be up to businesses to put this data to use.
This phenomenon will present radical new ways of interacting with customers, streamlining business cycles, and reducing operational costs, stimulating trillions of dollars in opportunity for businesses.
“Enterprises today are looking for solutions that help them go beyond the collation and storage of all this data to identify “high value” data and extract insights from it to fuel business growth and competitive advantage,” says Mohammed Amin, Senior Vice President and Regional Manager, EMC Corporation.
The Peninsula
