200 Zettabytes by 2025: What That Means for Your Business Data Strategy

According to recent reports, the total amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed globally is projected to reach 149 zettabytes in 2024, and by 2028, it will skyrocket to over 394 zettabytes. To put that into perspective, that’s the equivalent of more than 49 trillion HD movies—all created, moved, and consumed across the planet.

The world is generating data at a pace we’ve never seen before.

According to recent reports, the total amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed globally is projected to reach 149 zettabytes in 2024, and by 2028, it will skyrocket to over 394 zettabytes. To put that into perspective, that’s the equivalent of more than 49 trillion HD movies—all created, moved, and consumed across the planet.

This exponential growth is being driven by everything from cloud computing and streaming platforms to IoT sensors and AI models. The spike in 2020 alone—largely due to the pandemic-fueled shift to remote work, virtual learning, and home entertainment—set a new high in global data replication.

But here’s the kicker: only 2% of data created in 2020 was saved and retained into 2021.

Storage Is Struggling to Keep Up

While we’re creating data at unprecedented speed, storage capacity is scrambling to catch up. In 2020, the world had an installed storage base of 6.7 zettabytes. That number is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 19.2%, but even that won’t be enough unless businesses rethink how they store, manage, and use their data.

Half of all data is already being stored in the cloud—a trend that’s only accelerating as on-premise infrastructure struggles to scale efficiently

What This Means for Your Business

If you’re running a business—large or small—this explosion of data represents a pivotal moment. You’re sitting on a goldmine of insights, but without the right systems in place, you might not even know it.

Here’s what to consider:

✅ You don’t need to store everything — but you do need to store the right things. Prioritise high-value, actionable data.

✅ Manual data wrangling won’t scale — Automation tools like Airbyte, dbt, and modern data orchestration pipelines are essential.

✅ Cloud-native is the future — Whether you’re using Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift, your data stack needs to be scalable, secure, and accessible.

✅ Good modeling = good decisions — Building robust fact and dimension models ensures the insights you’re getting are reliable.

How Emerald Codeworks Can Help

At Emerald Codeworks, we specialize in helping companies make sense of their data in this high-volume era. From designing scalable data warehouses to building ELT pipelines and custom integrations, we help businesses stay ahead of the curve.

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