Extract from Onna’s article “Why Cross-Functional Collaboration Is Critical in Data Governance”
By 2025, the global datasphere is expected to exceed 180 zettabytes. That’s 1 sextillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) bytes. To put this into perspective, if one zettabyte were equivalent to one second of high-quality audio streaming, then 180 zettabytes would allow you to play music continuously for over 5.7 million years without repeating a single song.
In short, we’re all generating a lot of data — and it’s overwhelming many organizations.
But data volume isn’t the only problem; data is also increasingly diverse. On average, large enterprises use 211 different applications, all of which generate data. Almost all of that data (90%) is unstructured, and according to IDC, 70% is never analyzed. That means organizations are sitting on a pile of data with no idea what’s in it. Is it a gold mine of useful corporate knowledge? Or a landmine of potential liability and other data risks? Perhaps both?
The likelihood and consequences of data chaos have never loomed larger. This chaos threatens to trap legal teams in an endless loop of frantically searching for the data they need for litigation, investigations, compliance efforts, data privacy requests, and security breach responses. On the flip side, the advantages of effective data management are substantial, offering significant benefits across these same domains.
