The exploding digital universe menas major opportunities for service providers

A new IDC study shows that the digital universe — defined as information that is either created, captured or replicated in digital form — is expanding, as more devices go digital and “digital containers” such as RFID tags and video monitors generate more content than ever.

This is a major challenge for businesses and consumers but potential good news for service providers, according to John Gantz, senior program manager for IDC and project director of the study “The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe.” Sponsored by EMC, the study pegs the digital universe at 281 exabytes, or 281 billion gigabytes in size — about 10% larger than the research firm predicted in its year-earlier report. By 2011, the digital universe should equal 1800 exabytes — 10 times larger than in 2006.

So much digital content is being created that there is not enough available storage to contain it all, even though storage devices also are proliferating quickly, Gantz said.

“A lot of the digital information doesn't need to be stored — voice packets, for example,” Gantz said. “But the point is, we couldn't store it all if we tried to, even though storage is also expanding rapidly and getting cheaper. So there has to be decisions made about how to manage all this data, what to store and where to store it, as well as how to manage it and keep it secure. And someone has to keep track of all the digital containers.”

Therein lies opportunity for service providers, Gantz said. Their customers will look for help to manage the data being generated as well as the proliferating number of devices.

Other highlights of the report include:

• The number of electronic information containers is growing 50% faster than the number of digital gigabytes. A group of these devices, including RFID tags, sensors and voice-over-IP packets, account to 99% of all information “containers” but generate less than 6% of digital universe traffic.
• Seventy percent of the digital universe is created by individuals, including consumers and information workers well outside the data center. At some point, enterprises have responsibility or liability for 85% of that traffic, which may include providing security, protecting privacy or copyrights, screening for obscenity, detecting fraud, reporting on and archiving content, searching and retrieving within content, and deciding when to dispose of content.