Spending on data infrastructure is projected to reach $1.7 trillion by 2025. At the same time, 85 percent of organizations report difficulties managing that growth. This article details the resulting pressures on cost, quality, and performance.
Key Takeaways
- $1.7 trillion: projected global spending on data infrastructure (storage, analytics, and related) by 2025 (IDC forecast)
- $598 billion: worldwide big data and business analytics spending in 2023 (IDC)
- $274.3 billion: worldwide spending on public cloud services in 2024 (IDC forecast)
- 85% of organizations say they have trouble managing data growth
- 25% of all data in the world is expected to be stored in public cloud by 2025
- 51% of organizations say they have experienced data breaches or attempted breaches in the last 12 months
- 57% of organizations report that data integration is a top challenge for scaling analytics
- 49% of respondents say poor data quality results in measurable business impact (lost revenue, increased costs, or delays)
- 46% of organizations report that data latency is a business problem they need to address
- 25% of organizations are unable to meet data timeliness requirements in service-level agreements
- Average time to restore critical data after ransomware incidents increased to 15 days in 2023 (Median dwell-to-recovery in incident response datasets), showing growing impact of data scale on recovery performance
- 45% of IT leaders expect storage capacity to be a top driver of infrastructure cost within 12 months
- 1.9x: projected increase in spending on data center power and cooling from 2018 to 2030
- 38% of respondents say they are unable to measure data storage costs accurately (FinOps survey insight reflecting cost-management gaps as data scales)
- 58% of organizations use at least one cloud platform for analytics
By 2025, data infrastructure spending could reach $1.7 trillion as most organizations struggle with integration, quality, and cloud costs.
Related reading
01 · Category
Market Size16 stats
01
$1.7 trillion: projected global spending on data infrastructure (storage, analytics, and related) by 2025 (IDC forecast)
02
$598 billion: worldwide big data and business analytics spending in 2023 (IDC)
03
$274.3 billion: worldwide spending on public cloud services in 2024 (IDC forecast)
04
$1.1 trillion: worldwide cloud services forecast for 2027 (IDC)
05
$113.6 billion: worldwide enterprise infrastructure spending in 2023 (IDC)
06
$91.4 billion: worldwide IT spending on storage in 2024 (IDC forecast)
07
$24.9 billion: worldwide data integration software market size in 2023 (Gartner? published elsewhere)
08
$46.4 billion: global data catalog software market size in 2024 (Gartner forecast)
09
$18.8 billion: worldwide data warehouse systems market in 2024 (Gartner forecast)
10
$13.5 billion: worldwide data preparation market size in 2024 (Gartner forecast)
11
$6.2 billion: worldwide master data management market size in 2024 (Gartner forecast)
12
$14.9 billion: worldwide data management platform software market size in 2024 (Gartner forecast)
13
$4.7 billion: worldwide metadata management software market size in 2024 (Gartner forecast)
14
$1.8 billion: worldwide governance, risk, and compliance analytics market in 2024 (Gartner forecast)
15
$27.6 billion: worldwide cloud data warehouse market size in 2024 (Gartner forecast)
16
$10.2 billion: worldwide data observability market size in 2024 (Gartner forecast)
Interpretation
Market Size Interpretation
For the Market Size angle, IDC’s forecasts show massive, fast-growing investment in data capabilities with public cloud spending reaching $274.3 billion in 2024 and climbing to $1.1 trillion by 2027, alongside $1.7 trillion projected for global data infrastructure by 2025.
02 · Category
Industry Trends4 stats
01
85% of organizations say they have trouble managing data growth
02
25% of all data in the world is expected to be stored in public cloud by 2025
03
51% of organizations say they have experienced data breaches or attempted breaches in the last 12 months
04
3.3% of EU GDP is lost due to insufficient data availability, quality, or timeliness (estimated impact of poor data practices per European Commission study)
Interpretation
Industry Trends Interpretation
Industry Trends show that data growth is becoming a major operational and risk challenge, with 85% of organizations struggling to manage it while 51% report data breaches or attempted breaches in the past 12 months.
03 · Category
Data Management2 stats
01
57% of organizations report that data integration is a top challenge for scaling analytics
02
49% of respondents say poor data quality results in measurable business impact (lost revenue, increased costs, or delays)
Interpretation
Data Management Interpretation
From a Data Management perspective, organizations are being held back by data issues with 57% citing data integration as a top challenge for scaling analytics and 49% reporting that poor data quality creates measurable business impact.
More related reading
04 · Category
Performance Metrics4 stats
01
46% of organizations report that data latency is a business problem they need to address
02
25% of organizations are unable to meet data timeliness requirements in service-level agreements
03
Average time to restore critical data after ransomware incidents increased to 15 days in 2023 (Median dwell-to-recovery in incident response datasets), showing growing impact of data scale on recovery performance
04
62% of respondents track lineage to improve impact analysis when making changes to datasets, reducing downtime risk as data dependencies grow
Interpretation
Performance Metrics Interpretation
Performance Metrics reveal that data freshness and recoverability are major pain points, with 46% of organizations flagging latency as a business problem, 25% missing SLA timeliness targets, and ransomware recovery taking a median 15 days in 2023.
05 · Category
Cost Analysis6 stats
01
45% of IT leaders expect storage capacity to be a top driver of infrastructure cost within 12 months
02
1.9x: projected increase in spending on data center power and cooling from 2018 to 2030
03
38% of respondents say they are unable to measure data storage costs accurately (FinOps survey insight reflecting cost-management gaps as data scales)
04
Up to 40% of enterprise cloud spend is estimated to be waste (e.g., unused resources) according to Gartner; this waste often scales with data growth and overprovisioning
05
35% of organizations report they have difficulty estimating total cost of ownership for data platforms as datasets grow
06
58% of organizations reported that data quality issues cause measurable business impact (lost revenue, increased costs, or delays) in at least one business unit, demonstrating ongoing operational cost effects from poor data readiness
Interpretation
Cost Analysis Interpretation
Cost analysis is becoming more urgent because a large share of organizations anticipate rising infrastructure expenses and still struggle to manage them, with 45% of IT leaders expecting storage capacity to drive costs in the next 12 months and 38% unable to measure data storage costs accurately.
06 · Category
User Adoption4 stats
01
58% of organizations use at least one cloud platform for analytics
02
73% of organizations are either already using or plan to use generative AI in production
03
68% of respondents say they use automated data quality checks in their pipelines
04
63% of respondents reported using data pipelines (ETL/ELT) for analytics workflows, reflecting adoption of ingestion and transformation tooling to handle growth
Interpretation
User Adoption Interpretation
User Adoption is accelerating, with 73% of organizations already using or planning generative AI in production and 63% reporting they use data pipelines for analytics workflows, supported by widespread cloud analytics adoption at 58% and automated data quality checks at 68%.
report visual · Projection
Data Growth Is Expanding Fast
Spending forecasts and budgets show rapid scale-up across data infrastructure and cloud—driving new challenges for storage, management, and cost control.
598,000,000,000 Spending (USD, billions/trillions)
Start
-99.88%
CAGR · 4y
1.2 Spending (USD, billions/trillions)
Projected
20232027
source-verifiedidc.com2027
Reference
Cite This Report
This report is designed to be cited. We maintain stable URLs and versioned verification dates. Copy the format appropriate for your publication below.
APA
Elif Demirci. (2026, February 13). Data Growth Statistics. Gitnux. https://gitnux.org/data-growth-statistics
MLA
Elif Demirci. "Data Growth Statistics." Gitnux, 13 Feb 2026, https://gitnux.org/data-growth-statistics.
Chicago
Elif Demirci. 2026. "Data Growth Statistics." Gitnux. https://gitnux.org/data-growth-statistics.
Sources & references
36 datasets cited across this report · attribution is report-level
+20 additional datasets cited (not shown individually)