EMEA WW Storage From 9.5ZB in 2018 to 48.3ZB in 2025, 27% CAGR

Driven by video surveillance, signals from IoT devices, metadata, and entertainment

The Global Datasphere, a measure of how much new data is created and replicated each year, will grow by more than five times over the next seven years. The total amount of new data created in 2025 is forecast to increase to 175ZB from 33ZB in 2018.

The major drivers of this growth are largely consistent across the world’s various regions but occur at different rates. Entertainment data and video surveillance footage have long been (and continue to be) significant drivers of the Global Datasphere. However, signals from the IoT devices, metadata (vital for analytics, contextualization, and AI], and productivity data are showing even faster growth in today’s increasingly digitized world.

Nevertheless, amid the similarities across various regions, there are subtle differences. These differences are based on technology adoption and digital transformation across a region’s population of consumers and enterprises.

The Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) storage is growing slightly slower than the overall Global Datasphere (a 2018-2025 CAGR of 26.1% versus 27.2%, respectively). The EMEA storage will increase from 9.5ZB in 2018 to 48.3ZB in 2025, or from 28.8% to 27.6% of the WW storage, respectively. Nearly one third will be driven by growth of video surveillance, signals from IoT devices, metadata, and entertainment. For example, user-created and user-consumed online video like YouTube is one of the top 5 fastest-growing segments of data creation.
Also contributing to growth of the EMEA storage is the sheer number of users getting online for the first time to begin their own digital journeys that result in the consumption, creation, and sharing of data. In MEA countries alone, only 31% of the population in 2018 is using the Internet compared with 86% in Western Europe countries and 53% globally. This dynamic places pressure on enterprises and governments to upgrade infrastructures to accommodate the growing base of users. 

In the more technologically advanced EMEA countries, the edge is an important intermediary between the core and the endpoints to help facilitate the creation and consumption of online video, as well as real-time, on-the-go decisions. Hence the%age of data in the EMEA Datasphere emanating from or replicated in the edge will nearly double – from 11% to 21% of the region’s total Datasphere – as IoT devices increasingly drive processing and analytics closer to the point of origin of the data itself.

Data is at the heart of this digital world, and we are increasingly becoming an information economy. The value is moving to data so that we can create a new world of smarter products, better customer experiences, and self-learning and always improving digital services. In fact, 43% of EMEA organizations executing on digital transformation initiatives have put data capitalization as the top priority to progress. Data is also the heartbeat of modern user experiences and services built using next-generation technologies such as cognitive, IoT, AI, and machine learning.

This unprecedented data growth combined with the pressures of deriving value from data for digital transformation will create imperatives for IT and business organizations across all regions over the next decade to develop a fitting storage, management, and capitalization strategy and drive a new level of engagement with consumers using data-informed services and products. Whether it’s surveillance growth in the UK and France, manufacturing in Germany, or growth in Russia’s mining industry, data is playing a much more critical role.