Plan for the Data Tidal Wave: Why Growth Forecasting + Cloud FinOps Belong in your IT Strategy

Every year brings more data — and the pace isn’t slowing. For IT leaders that means two things at once: enormous opportunity (insights, personalization, automation) and genuine risk (storage sprawl, runaway bills, compliance headaches). If you treat data growth like an IT afterthought, you’ll get surprised by both capacity and cost — and neither surprise helps the business.

Statista’s forecasts put global data creation at roughly 181 zettabytes by 2025 — roughly a 20–25% year-over-year increase in the near term. Their long term projections are even more stark, they estimate that by 2028, the total volume of data created, captured, copied, and consumed worldwide is expected to reach 394 zettabytes. 

This acceleration isn’t being driven by a single trend, but by the convergence of several forces. Cloud-native applications generate telemetry and log data continuously. AI and analytics platforms rely on massive training datasets and produce large volumes of derived data. IoT devices, smart infrastructure, and connected sensors stream data around the clock, often duplicating it across regions for resilience and compliance. At the same time, regulatory, security, and business continuity requirements are extending retention periods, meaning far less data is ever truly deleted.

The result is a compounding effect: more sources producing more data, at higher frequencies, stored for longer — pushing total data volumes upward at an exponential pace rather than a linear one.

1. Capacity is only half the problem. You need performance, availability, backup/DR, and regulatory controls, all of which change as data grows. The wrong choices now amplify operational work and costs later. (See IDC/Seagate projections for how storage demand scales with creation.) 
2. Data value decays — and so should cost. Not every byte needs the same treatment. The same dataset’s business value typically drops over time, so storage policies should reflect that lifecycle. If everything lives on the most expensive tier, costs grow linearly with data volume and quickly become unsustainable.
3. Security & compliance scale too. As data multiplies, so do your exposure and compliance surface areas. Planning for growth means embedding governance, classification, and retention rules upstream.

The cloud is the natural place to scale: it gives elastic capacity, managed durability, global replication options, and a vast range of storage tiers. For many organizations, cloud reduces capital cycles, speeds time-to-market, and democratizes data access. Industry demand for cloud services and data infrastructure continues to accelerate.

But the cloud also introduces new cost drivers:

• Overprovisioned or underutilized managed services.
• Egress and retrieval fees (archive retrievals, cross-region transfers).
• Growing metadata and replication overhead as datasets balloon.

Recent industry surveys and show many organizations are exceeding cloud budgets as usage and egress fees surprise them. Cost remains a top cloud concern and a leading reason enterprises adopt FinOps and tighter governance. 

If you adopt cloud to solve scale, pair it with a deliberate cost program. This is where FinOps becomes essential. FinOps is a cross-functional operating model that brings finance, IT, and engineering together to make cloud spending visible, measurable, and accountable. Rather than reacting to surprise invoices after the fact, organizations using FinOps practices can forecast demand, align usage with business value, and continuously optimize spend as data growth accelerates.

In an environment of exponential data creation, FinOps helps prevent cloud cost overruns by introducing discipline into how storage and data services are consumed. Through cost allocation, tagging, and real-time usage insights, teams gain a clear understanding of which applications, departments, or workloads are driving spend. FinOps also enables smarter decisions around storage tiering, lifecycle policies, and retention strategies—ensuring high-value, frequently accessed data stays performant, while aging or infrequently used data automatically shifts to lower-cost storage. The result is a cloud environment that scales intentionally, not wastefully.

Take the next step: Strategic Communications’ FinOps Assessment helps organizations understand their current cloud cost posture, identify immediate optimization opportunities, and build a sustainable framework for managing cloud spend as data continues to grow. Optimize technology spend with data-driven insight—and ensure your cloud strategy can scale without surprises.