World's digital information doubles every 2 years – study

The world's information is more than doubling every two years—with a 1.8 zettabytes to be created and replicated in 2011, according to an IDC Digital Universe study sponsored by EMC. The study also found the new "information taming" technologies are driving the cost of creating, capturing, managing and storing information down to one-sixth of what it was in 2005. Additionally, since 2005 annual enterprise investments in the Digital Universe—cloud, hardware, software, services, and staff to create, manage, store and generate revenue from the information—have increased by 50 percent to USD 4 trillion. The report further indicates that the skills, experience, and resources to manage the amount of data and resources is not keeping pace with all areas of growth. By 2020, IT departments worldwide are forecast to experience 10X the number of servers (virtual and physical), 50X the amount of information to be managed, 75X the number of files or containers that encapsulate the information in the digital universe, which is growing even faster than the information itself as more and more embedded systems, such as sensors in clothing, in bridges, or medical devices, 1.5X the number of IT professionals available to manage it all. While cloud computing accounts for less than 2 percent of IT spending today, the report estimates that by 2015 nearly 20 percent of the information will be "touched" by cloud computing service providers. As much as 10 percent is expected to be maintained in a cloud. Cloud computing services – both public and private and a combination of the two known as hybrid — provide enterprises with new levels of economies of scale, agility, and flexibility, compared to traditional IT environments. In the long term, this is expected to be a key tool for dealing with the complexity of the digital universe. The study also found that less than a third of the information in the digital universe has at least minimal security or protection, and only about half the information that should be protected is protected.