EMC: Destination: Information: The Digital Universe

EMC: Destination: Information: The Digital Universe
this report was featured in today's Guardian newspaper, and is great for IT factoids and trends:
"The airwaves, telephone circuits, and computer cables are buzzing. Digital information surrounds us. We see digital bits on our new HDTVs, listen to them over the Internet, and create new ones ourselves every time we take a picture with our digital cameras. Then we email them to friends and family and create more digital bits.
There's no secret here. YouTube, a company that didn’t exist just a few years ago, hosts 100 million video streams a day.i
Experts say more than a billion songs a day are shared over the Internet in MP3 format.ii Digital bits. London's 200 traffic surveillance cameras send 64 trillion bits a day to the command data center.iii Chevron's CIO says his company accumulates data at the rate of 2 terabytes – 17,592,000,000,000 bits – a day.iv TV broadcasting is going all-digital by the end of the decade in most countries. More digital bits.
What is a secret – one staring us in the face – is how much all these bits add up to, how fast they are multiplying, and what their proliferation imply.
This White Paper, sponsored by EMC, is IDC's forecast of the digital universe – all the 1s and 0s created, captured, and replicated – and the implications for those who take the photos, share the music, and generate the digital bits and those who organize, secure, and manage the access to and storage of the information....
...• In 2006, the amount of digital information created,
captured, and replicated was 1,288 x 1018 bits. In computer
parlance, that's 161 exabytes or 161 billion gigabytes (see
sidebar). This is about 3 million times the information in all
the books ever written.
• Between 2006 and 2010, the information added annually to
the digital universe will increase more than six fold from 161
exabytes to 988 exabytes.
• Three major analog to digital conversions are powering this
growth – film to digital image capture, analog to digital
voice, and analog to digital TV.
• Images, captured by more than 1 billion devices in the world,
from digital cameras and camera phones to medical scanners
and security cameras, comprise the largest component of the
digital universe. They are replicated over the Internet, on
private organizational networks, by PCs and servers, in data
centers, in digital TV broadcasts, and on digital projection
movie screens.
• IDC predicts that by 2010, while nearly 70% of the digital
universe will be created by individuals, organizations
(businesses of all sizes, agencies, governments, associations,
etc.) will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability,
and compliance of at least 85% of that same digital universe.
• This rapidly expanding responsibility will put pressure on
existing computing operations and drive organizations to
develop more information-centric computing architectures.
• IT managers will see the span of their domains considerably
enlarged – as VoIP phones come onto corporate networks,
building automation and security migrates to IP networks,
surveillance goes digital, and RFID and sensor networks
proliferate.
• Information security and privacy protection will become a
boardroom concern as organizations and their customers
become increasingly tied together in real-time. This will
require the implementation of new security technologies in
addition to new training, policies, and procedures.
• IDC estimates that today, 20% of the digital universe is
subject to compliance rules and standards, and about 30% is
potentially subject to security applications.
• The community with access to corporate data will become
more diffuse – as workers become more mobile, companies
implement customer self service, and globalization diversifies
customer and partner relationships and elongates supply
chains.
• The growth of the digital universe is uneven. Emerging
economies – Asia Pacific without Japan and the rest of the
world outside North America and Western Europe – now
account for 10% of the digital universe, but will grow 30%-
40% faster than mature economies.
• In 2007 the amount of information created will surpass, for
the first time, the storage capacity available.
This incredible growth of the digital universe means more than
simply the fact that as individuals we will be facing information
explosion on an unprecedented scale. It has implications for
organizations concerning privacy, security, intellectual property
protection, content management, technology adoption,
information management, and data center architecture.
The growth and heterogeneous character of the bits in the
digital universe mean that organizations worldwide, large and
small, whose IT infrastructures transport, store, secure, and
replicate these bits, have little choice but to employ ever more
sophisticated techniques for information management, security,
search, and storage..."