"To the trained eye, the amount of information being presented is impressive. You can instantly determine areas of high or low values for the data set and correlate those values based on the appropriate analysis. "
John Myers, BBBT on BIS² Data Visualization
More data has been created since 2005 than in the previous 40,000 years. The total amount of data has actually quadrupled in the last three years. The topic itself and all its iterations could arguably be the reigning theme of our time. It is a dizzying exponential growth in both complexity and content.
In only the last few years, we have gone from kilobytes stored on floppy disks to megabytes stored on CD-ROMs. Gigabytes and Terabytes are now stored on our computer hard drives, petabytes and exabytes are stored in disk arrays. Storage analogies have moved from files and folders to file cabinets and libraries. Enter the Zettabyte Age.
IDC's, “The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011” highlights findings that are newly updated since IDC’s inaugural forecast of the digital universe was published in March 2007. IDC estimate that the growth of electronic data created and stored by 2011 will reflect a compound annual growth rate of almost 60% from 2006 figures.
Key points highlighted in the research paper:
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At 281 billion gigabytes (281 exabytes), the digital universe in 2007 was 10% bigger than originally estimated
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With a compound annual growth rate of almost 60%, the digital universe is growing faster and is projected to be nearly 1.8 zettabytes (1,800 exabytes) in 2011, a 10-fold increase over the next five years
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Your “Digital Shadow” – that is, all the digital information generated about the average person on a daily basis – now surpasses the amount of digital information individuals actively create themselves