11:11 AM
Amit Khajuria
Before you skimp on the size of your next hard drive to shave a few bucks off your system build, you should consider the state of the digital universe. To help you do that, IDC put together its fifth annual study of the digital universe sponsored by EMC Corporation and found that it's, well, big and vast. We already knew that last year when planet Earth broke the zettabyte barrier, and by the end of 2011, the amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1.8 zettabytes (that's 1.8 trillion gigabytes), growing by a factor of 9 in just five years, IDC says. Those 1.8 trillion gigabytes are contained in 500 quadrillion files, a number that more than doubles every two years and is also as many bits of information in the digital universe as there are stars in our physical universe.
"However, unlike our physical universe where matter is neither created nor destroyed, our digital universe is replete with bits of data that exist but for a moment -- enough time for our eyes or ears to ingest the information before the bits evaporate into a nonexistent digital dump," IDC says.
Two-thirds of the information in the digital universe is generated by individuals, though enterprises have some liability for 80 percent of information at some point in its digital life. By 2020, the world will generate 50 times the amount of information as today and 75 times the number of "information containers," while IT staff to manage it will grow less than 1.5 times, according to the study.
You can check out the full report here (PDF) and a nifty infographic here (PDF).
Image Credit: IDC
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