[Air-l] 988 exabytes of info created in 2010

[Janna Anderson]

http://www.internetnews.com/stats/article.php/3663641

March 6, 2007
Billions and Billions of Gigabytes Served
By Clint Boulton
Internetnews.com

Several reports talk about how the explosion of digital information is
creating new challenges for companies trying to rein in IT costs. Others
tell us how to cope with these challenges. But none tells us just how big
the information glut will be in the next few years. Until now.

Researcher IDC today released a report, sponsored by information management
vendor EMC, forecasting that as much as 988 billion gigabytes of digital
information will be created in 2010, a six-fold increase from 2006.

Last year, 161 exabytes (exabyte is a billion gigabytes) of digital
information were created, representing roughly 3 million times the
information in all the books ever written. Or, if you prefer, the equivalent
of 12 stacks of books, each extending more than 92 million miles from the
earth to the sun.

Whoa.

>From now until 2010, IDC said it expects information will sport a compound
annual growth rate of 57 percent to hit the 988 exabyte mark.

While IDC isn't pushing any panic buttons yet, Chief Research Officer John
Gantz said all companies, from Wal-Mart to AT&T to the bicycle shop down the
street, will eventually need to employ more sophisticated techniques to
transport, store, secure and replicate the information.

"The diversity of information, from very small packets of info from RFID to
very large video surveillance files, is different among different
constituencies in an organization," Gantz told internetnews.com.

"You can't treat all data, all packets, and all bytes the same. That's where
you get into interesting situations of classifying data and determining what
you save and what you don't.

Whether it's putting more bytes per platter or moving direct-attached
storage to storage area networks, Gantz said vendors have to keep advancing
information management technology because the "digital universe" is not
going to stop growing.

Thanks to the Internet, that digital universe is thriving.

Only 48 million people routinely logged onto the Internet in 1996. Last
year, there were 1.1 billion users on the Internet. IDC expects another 500
million users to come online by 2010.

Those users aren't just surfing Web sites to find out whether the Yankees or
Red Sox won. They're creating scores of unstructured data, including images
and e-mails, and exchanging them.

Pictures are the leading usurpers of gigabytes. People love taking and
sending them. IDC said images taken from digital cameras, camera phones,
medical scanners and security cameras will absorb the largest number of
bytes, topping 500 billion by 2010.

No surprise when you consider images captured on consumer digital cameras in
2006 exceeded 150 billion worldwide, while the number of images captured on
cell phones hit almost 100 billion.

And there have been, and will continue to be, a lot of e-mail.

>From 1998 to 2006, the number of e-mail mailboxes grew from 253 million to
nearly 1.6 billion. During the same period, the number of e-mails sent grew
three times faster than the number of people e-mailing.

Instant messaging? IDC predicts 250 million IM accounts by 2010.

What are we to make of this digital information bounty? You can say people
are hungry for information, that they are gluttonous consumers for
knowledge, be it trivial or profound.

But these consumers are actually also information creators, and that will
only snowball with the current explosion in wikis and blogs, which provide
avenues on which information travel.

IDC said that while nearly 70 percent of the digital universe will be
generated by individuals by 2010, most of this content will be touched by a
business.

Information will traverse telephones, Internet switches, hosting sites,
storage sites, networks or datacenters, and enterprises will be responsible
for the security, privacy, reliability and compliance of 85 percent of the
information. 

 
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-- 
Janna Quitney Anderson
Assistant Professor of Communications
Director of Internet Projects
School of Communications
Elon University
andersj at elon.edu
(336) 278-5733 (o)
(336) 446-0486 (h)