With 90 percent of the world’s data created during the last two years, what can we expect our data vaults to hold two or even 20 years from now? Today we measure our lives in peta-bytes, but by 2020 estimates show a 2,300-percent increase in the bits and bytes that will define our lives.

How then can we as a society leverage the intrinsic value of so much data without getting bogged down with its complexity?

Around the turn of the century, we experienced a similar moment of euphoria when retail outlets opened “virtual stores” and sold products to online buyers. A famous IBM TV ad once depicted an overwhelmed young company whose products went from a few online orders a day to hundreds of thousands. In many respects we have come full circle and are back at the starting gate of yet-another era of unprecedented growth—only this time instead of millions of orders, the focus is on zillions of data points.

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