The explosion of digital data media boosted by the
growth of user interactions with websites will stretch
organisation’s IT departments, new research has found.
Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide
Information Growth Through 2010, published by analyst firm IDC,
has found that 161 exabytes (billions of gigabytes) of information
was created last year alone.
Although, individuals will generate nearly 70% of this digital
content, organisations will be responsible for the security,
privacy, reliability and compliance of at least 85% of the data,
calling into question future storage and data retention plans.
John Gantz, IDC chief research officer and senior vice
president, said, “Organisations will need to employ ever-more
sophisticated techniques to transport, store, secure and replicate
the additional information that is being generated every
day.”
The findings of the EMC-sponsored research also predict a six-fold
annual increase in information created between 2006 and 2010,
surging more than six-fold to 988 exabytes to create a compound
annual growth rate of 57% at the end of this period.
The report also estimates that today less than 10% of
organisational information is “classified,” or ranked according to
value.
IDC expects the amount of classified data to grow more than 50%
a year. This is, it says, because of broadband-speed internet and
its accelerated adoption across the world, but particularly in
emerging economies, which will grow the amount of media, video,
e-mails and instant messages created and that will need to be
stored.
“This ever-growing mass of information is putting a
considerable strain on the IT infrastructures we have in place
today,” said Mark Lewis, EMC executive vice president and chief
development officer.
“This explosive growth will change the way organisations and IT
professionals do their jobs, and the way we consumers use
information.”
Buzz builds around data reduction
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