India bucks global trend: her data grows twice as fast: IDC-EMC study

12th September 2010
India  bucks global trend: her data grows twice as fast: IDC-EMC study
Lotta data out there!

Over the coming decade (2010 to 2020), digital information in India will grow from 40,000 petabytes to 2.3 million petabytes, -- twice as fast as the worldwide rate, finds an IDC study. India’s share of digital information is expected to grow 60-fold by 2020, driven by 3G and Broadband Wireless Networks, the imminent shift from analogue to digital television networks, and increased technology adoption among individuals, SMBs, enterprises and in Government services like the Unique ID project, Census, etc.

Information infrastructure solutions leader,EMC Corporation, has announced India-related findings of the annual IDC Digital Universe Study that it sponsors. The study  revealed that 50 percent more digital information is created today in India than the capacity that exists to store it. This number will grow to 80 percent over the next decade. A good portion of this information will either reside in the cloud or pass through it.
“The digital information explosion will create significant challenges for India’s CIOs and IT managers for two reasons,” says Manoj Chugh, President, EMC India and SAARC and Director of Global Accounts for EMC Asia Pacific & Japan. “First, enterprises have responsibility for the storage, protection and management of 80 percent of the Digital Universe’s data, and this liability will only increase as social networking and Web 2.0 technologies continue to impact the enterprise.

Global scene
The international findings of the report are: Last year, despite the global recession, the Digital Universe set a record. It grew by 62% to nearly 800,000 petabytes. A petabyte is a million gigabytes. Picture a stack of DVDs reaching from the earth to the moon and back. This year, the Digital Universe will grow almost as fast to 1.2 million petabytes, or 1.2 zettabytes. This explosive growth means that by 2020, our Digital Universe will be 44 TIMES AS BIG as it was in 2009. What comes after a quadrillion? A quintillion, an incomprehensible number, yet the one you need to describe the number of information containers – packets, files, images, records, signals – that the bits in the Digital Universe will be in by 2020. There will be 25 quintillion containers.
These containers, the files if you will, are the things that are actually managed, protected, and stored in the Digital Universe.
And, because of the growth of embedded systems in the smart grid, smart cities, logistic item tracking, and so on, the average file size in the universe is getting smaller. The number of things to be managed is growing twice as fast as the total number of gigabytes. Good luck, all you CIOs out there.
Link to Digital Universe study and related EMC materials: http://www.emc.com/collateral/demos/microsites/idc-digital-universe/iview.htm  

See  our video on this study on the home page for a few days
TECH Note: making sense of the jargon:
Bit (b) 1 or 0
Byte (B) 8 bits
Kilobyte (KB) 1,000 bytes
Megabyte (MB) 1,000 KB
Gigabyte (GB) 1,000 MB
Terabyte (TB) 1,000, GB
Petabyte (PB) 1,000 TB
Exabyte (EB) 1,000 PB
Zettabyte (ZB) 1,000 EB 

Sep 13 2010