The past 15 months have provided an object lesson for all organizations in the importance of being agile and moving quickly to address new challenges and opportunities. The COVID-19 pandemic created even greater urgency to better manage and extract valuable insights from data for companies that were already dealing with expanding regulatory pressures, new data security risks, and burgeoning data volumes.

The pace of data growth shows no sign of letting up. In 2020, 64.2ZB of data was created or replicated, according to IDC, and, in its 2021 DataSphere and StorageSphere forecasts, the analyst firm projects that global data creation and replication will experience a compound annual growth rate of 23% over the 2020–2025 forecast period.