161 exabytes and growing

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 07 March 2007 01:51

Business IT - Technology

But current concerns with 'compliance' mean that organisations are being pressured into keeping copies of many more of their communications than was previously considered usual practice.

To make things difficult, most of the growth is in unstructured data, which is inherently difficult to retrieve. IDC believes this will be gradually overcome in three ways: adding more metadata, automatic classification (eg, face recognition), and by developing access systems that provide structured views of structured and unstructured data.

Other key finding of the study include:

By 2010, nearly 70 percent of digital data will be created by individuals, but organisations will have responsibility for the security, privacy and reliability of 85 percent of it - compliance again!

Corporate data will be accessed by a broader and more diffuse set of users due to mobility, self-service, and supply chain changes.

Data growth in nations outside Western Europe, North America and Japan will be 30-40 percent faster than in the mature economies.