The amount of data produced by the Earth over the next eight years will be ZB

According to IDC's Digital Universe Research Report (Digital universe), we will generate more data over the next 8 years than ZB (KB), which is equivalent to 5200GB of data per person on Earth.

40ZB equals 40 trillion GB, estimated to be 57 times times the number of sand grains on all beaches on Earth. To reach this figure, all data are expected to double every two years between now and 2020.

Much of the data from now to 2020 will not be generated by humans, but by machines, including machine sensors and smart devices that communicate with other devices.

IDC estimates that by 2020, 33% of the data will contain valuable information.

Research Report on the Digital Universe (Digital universe)

The digital universe includes images and videos, digital movies, and also traditional corporate data, such as bank data, security record data for airports and major events, and the subatomic collision records of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Using business intelligence to analyze data can expose the usage patterns of social media, the relevance of scientific data, and so on. "The use of ' big data ' or MapReduce technology to extract value from large amounts of untapped data," IDC said in the study. ”

The Digital Universe study, sponsored by EMC, was first launched in 2005 and is updated every year for the first three years. However, this latest update is up to 18 months from the previous version. The previous version, released in June 2011, predicted that the amount of data generated by 2020 would be 35ZB, rather than 40ZB.

EMC Global marketing chief technology officer Chuck Hollis says the latest IDC research shows that the number of physical or virtual servers in the enterprise will increase by 10 times times by 2020.

"From another point of view, the data you now have per TB will increase by 14 times times by 2020," he says, "and I believe people in the IT industry are aware of that." ”

The study shows that the number of servers worldwide will increase by 10 times times, while the amount of information managed directly by the Enterprise data Center will increase by 14 times times, while the number of IT professionals is expected to increase by 1.5 times times.

To manage this data growth, Hollis says, businesses need to readjust to create an automated service-oriented architecture (SOA) that allows the enterprise sector to automatically configure and pay for servers, networks, and storage capacity from an online catalog.

Requires higher efficiency

The Digital Universe research is in line with Hollis's view. IT managers must find ways to improve the efficiency of their infrastructure, allowing IT administrators to focus on more valuable activities such as BYOD policies, large data analysis, customer networking rates, and security. One approach, the study shows, is to consolidate storage, servers, and networks through the integration of infrastructure.

In the area of cloud storage, the Digital Universe Research report presents a different view of "much of the future data will be stored in cloud computing."

Although the current cost of public and private cloud computing is less than 5% of overall IT spending, IDC estimates that by 2020, nearly 40% of the information will be "exposed" to cloud computing (such as transmission), while only about 15% of the data will be stored in a cloud environment.

Between 2012 and 2020, investment in management, research and storage data will increase by only 40%. As a result, the investment per gigabyte will drop from 2 dollars to 20 cents.

Entertainment and social media

Much of the data in the digital universe is entertainment or social media data. In 2012, 68% of the data involved users watching digital TV, using social media or sending photos and videos of their mobile phones. Companies, however, need to take responsibility for 80% of the information in the digital universe.

Therefore, the enterprise must deal with copyright, privacy and compliance issues, even if the data is mainly used by users.

IDC's study estimates that around one-third of all data requires some form of protection, privacy needs, compliance, or digital eavesdropping or theft. However, only about 20% of the data currently has these protections. This level of security varies by region and has less protection in emerging high-tech markets, such as Brazil, Russia, factors, Malaysia and Arabia.

IDC says emerging market countries will evolve from producing a handful of data to producing most of the data. For example, in 2005, 48% of all data in the digital universe came from the US and western Europe, and emerging markets accounted for less than 20%. However, emerging market data shares now reach 36%, up from 62% by 2020. By then, only China would have produced 21% of the data.

In addition, the study also found that:

The network is becoming more and more important. The incubation period must become shorter rather than longer. Data must be analyzed, deployed for security, and authenticated, and all need to be done in real time. In the next eight years, the network infrastructure will become a key investment.

Regulations that monitor information security must be coordinated and agreed on a global scale, although there will still be differences.

(editor: Heritage)