The Digital Universe Decade – Are You Ready?

IDC

–IVIEW

The Digital Universe Decade – Are You Ready?
May 2010
By John Gantz and David Reinsel

Sponsored by EMC Corporation
Content for this paper is excerpted directly from the IDC iView, "The Digital Universe
Decade – Are You Ready?" May 2010, sponsored by EMC. The multimedia content can be
viewed at http://www.emc.com/digital_universe

T he Digital Universe Decade
“You Ain’tSeen Nothing Yet.” The title of that track from the 1974 Bachman-Turner
Overdrive album Not Fragile aptly describes the state of today’s Digital Universe. Between
now and 2020, the amount of digital information created and replicated in the world will grow
to an almost inconceivable 35 trillion gigabytes as all major forms of media – voice, TV,
radio, print – complete the journey from analogto digital.
At the same time, the influx of consumer technologies into the workplace will create stresses
and strains on the organizations that must manage, store, protect, and dispose of all this
electronic content. So, if you have ever suffered from information overload or been
bombarded with emails, texts, instant messages, documents, pictures, videos, and social
network invitations, getready, this is just the beginning.
Since 2007, on behalf of EMC Corporation, IDC has been sizing what it calls the Digital
Universe, or the amount of digital information created and replicated in a year.
Here are just a few points to whet your appetite for the rest of the tabs in this I DC iView:
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Last year, despite the global recession, the Digital Universe set a record.It grew by
62% to nearly 800,000 petabytes. A petabyte is a million gigabytes. Picture a stack
of DVDs reaching from the earth to the moon and back.
This year, the Digital Universe will grow almost as fast to 1.2 million petabytes, or 1.2
zettabytes. (There’s a word we haven’t had to use until now.)
This explosive growth means that by 2020, our Digital Universe will be 44 TIMES AS
BIG as itwas in 2009 (Figure 1). Our stack of DVDs would now reach halfway to
Mars.

Here’s another question for you. What comes after a quadrillion? That’s right, a quintillion,
an incomprehensible number, yet the one you need to describe the number of information
containers – packets, files, images, records, signals – that the bits in the Digital Universe will
be in by 2020. There will be 25quintillion containers.
These containers, the files if you will, are the things that are actually managed, protected,
and stored in the Digital Universe.
And, because of the growth of embedded systems in the smart grid, smart cities, logistic
item tracking, and so on, the average file size in the universe is getting smaller. The number
of things to be managed is growing twice as fast as the totalnumber of gigabytes. Good
luck, all you CIOs out there.
Think of the growth of the Digital Universe as a perpetual tsunami. As this universe grows
by an order of magnitude, we will have to deal with information in new ways:
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How will we find the information we need when we need it? We will need new
search and discovery tools. Most of the Digital Universe is unstructured data (forexample, images and voice packets). We will need new ways to add structure to
unstructured data, to look INSIDE the information containers and recognize content
such as a face in a security video. In fact, the fastest-growing category in the Digital
Universe is metadata, or data about data.
How will we know what information we need to keep, and how will we keep it? Yes,
we will need newtechnical solutions tied to storage, but we will surely also need new
ways to manage our information. We’ll need to classify it by importance, know when
to delete it, and predict which information we will need in a hurry.

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©2010 IDC

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How will we follow the growing number of government and industry rules about
retaining records, tracking transactions, and ensuring information...