News

posted on 11 March 2008 16:06

EMC has sponsored IDC to re-visit the exploding digital universe report subject and IDC has found yet more digital data needing to be managed by EMC's information management products.

IDC found that information about people, their digital shadow, exceeds the information they contribute themselves.

Highlights of the study, 'The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011,' are:-

- At 281 billion gigabytes (281 exabytes), the digital universe in 2007 was 10 percent bigger than previously estimated
- With a compound annual growth rate of almost 60 percent, 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 five years

The digital shadow is about half the 45GB digital footprint that the average person has.

EMC's release makes this surprising observation: "The “Visual” Universe – the information explosion – at least in raw gigabytes – is predominately visual ... "

'Predominantly visual' ..... as Americans might say, go figure.

Other tidbits include:-

- Digital diversity – Because of the growth of VoIP, sensors, and RFID, the number of electronic information “containers” – files, images, packets, tag contents – is growing 50% faster than the number of gigabytes. The information created in 2011 will be contained in more than 20 quadrillion – 20 million billion – of such containers, a tremendous management challenge for both businesses and consumers.
- Digital cameras – In 2007, the number of digital cameras and camera phones in the world surpassed 1 billion, and fewer than 10% of all still images were captured on film.
- Digital surveillance – Shipments of networked digital surveillance cameras are doubling every year.

The moral of the study as far as EMC is concerned, concerns information governance. The firm states 'To deal with this explosion of the digital universe in size and complexity, organisations will need to spearhead the development of organisation-wide policies for information governance: information security, information retention, data access, and compliance.'

The digital diversity point might have an impact on the development of object-based storage systems as a kind of halfway house between file-based and block-based storage.

It's a good study from the point of view of EMC. In effect the company can say to its customers: "We are the supplier that's most aware of the problem, so buy our storage to store the data, and our information governance products to effect its security, retention and compliance."

If you want to gauge the size of your very own digital footprint EMC offers a software utility download here.

[Phil Robson, news editor.]