Data doubles daily a decade hence

Beverley Head
Wednesday, 16 March 2011 12:42

Digital information stored in corporations, on the public internet and on home computers is doubling every month. And if an increase of 2,048 fold in a year seems high, there are some who believe the amount of digital information will double each day by the end of the decade as people continue to use mobile devices to collect audio and video data.

On a visit to Sydney this week, Tom Jenkins, executive chairman and chief strategy officer of Canada based content management specialist Open Text, said that organisations need to prepare for an entirely new era of data deluge.

He said that at present the public internet stored less than 1 percent of the global digital data stores.

To prove the point he noted the documentation associated with an Airbus or Boeing passenger jet.  'If you were to print out the technical manual that is the description and DNA of that jet it prints out two times the volume of that jet because there are more than a million pieces in it and what most people don't appreciate is every jet is absolutely unique because you have a multiplicity of sub contractors.

'You have fleet of 5,000 of them and you get a feel for the enormity of the information. '

Mr Jenkins said that the scale of the private web developed by companies and government was really driving the amount of data being stored. While cheap storage had allowed companies to simply hoard more and more information, organisations were struggling to manage and find that information in a timely and economic fashion - and starting to come up against limits in terms of running the data centres to host it.

That was one of the reasons Mr Jenkins believed cloud based computing and storage would be adopted rapidly. He has just published a book called Managing Content in the Cloud, and is on a regional book tour.

Why will data double daily? Read on