Information Technology (IT) managers around the world should brace themselves for a staggering surge in the volume of digital information within the next three years, according to a recent study by research firm IDC in Framingham, Mass.
The study, called "The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010," predicts that increased use of rich media will push data volumes to more than 988 billion gigabytes in the next three years.
The survey of companies and government organizations was sponsored by storage tools developer EMC Corp. of Hopkinton, Mass.
Current digital data volume is around 161 billion gigabytes.
IDC notes that this is equivalent to three times all the information in all the books ever written or equal to 12 rows of books stacked end to end, extending from the earth to the sun.
"The year 2007 will be the first time the volume of information created will theoretically surpass available storage capacity," according to David Reinsel, program director of storage research at IDC.
He said while there was no cause for alarm, the survey results did reinforce the need to rationalize data storage and management.
"A lot of data is needlessly being copied and stored, and it is not cheap."
Although the survey did not cover cost structures, the IDC analyst said storage of unnecessary data drained cooling and power, real estate, software and management resources.
Both IDC and EMC traced digital information growth to increased Internet usage and the ever-increasing conversion of physical data to digital format.
According to Ken Steinhardt, chief technology officer for EMC, there's been a dramatic change in the nature of data being stored, with digital data volumes growing significantly.
About 30 years ago, Steinhardt said, the bulk of communications dealt with structured data.
Today, he said, the ubiquity of multimedia technology had led to an explosion of unstructured data [categories] such as music and video.
"We've moved away from the simple transactions of years past to the swapping of jpeg and mpeg files."
While 30 years ago a typical enterprise user file might have represented a row of figures in the database, today a similar file may contain digital photos and images of documents or digitized audio recordings.
More than 95 per cent of current digital information is unstructured data. In organizations, unstructured data accounts for more than 80 per cent of all information.
The IDC study also indicated that 70 per cent of the digital information created by the year 2010 would be generated by individuals.
For instance, IDC estimates there will be more than 500 billion images captured by digital camera users by 2010. To this has to be added the growing number of e-mail messages from 1.6 billion e-mail boxes and 250 million instant messaging accounts.
Enterprises and other large organizations would, in some way, be involved in the collection or handling of this data, said Reinsel. These institutions would be responsible for meeting privacy, security and compliance issues connected with at least 85 per cent of the information, he added.
Today, 20 per cent of all digital information was subject to compliance rules and standards, while security practices and procedures would apply to 30 per cent of corporate digital information, said IDC.
The consulting firm estimates, however, that less than 10 per cent of organizational information is currently classified or ranked according to value.
"It is important for enterprises to realize they will be trusted as stewards or custodians of this data," said Reinsel.
"This ever-growing mass of information will put a considerable strain on IT infrastructures; it will change the way IT professionals do their job and the way consumers use information," added Mark Lewis, vice-president and chief development officer, EMC.
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