EMC Corporation recently presented the findings of the Digital Universe study produced by IDC and called „Extracting Value from Chaos“.

 EMC commissioned the study for the fifth year in a row.  The study comes to the conclusion that the world’s data is more than doubling every two year and is growing faster than Moore’s Law – in 2011 an unbelievable 1.8 zettabytes of data will be created or replicated.  This equals, for example, more than 200 billion high-definition (HD) films (each lasting two hours) and it would take one person 47 million years to watch them without stopping form start to finish.

The study measures and estimates the volume of digital information created and copied each year and it analyzes the consequences for individuals, businesses and IT specialists.  It has huge economic, societal and technological impact on the area of Big Data and affords other opportunities.  For example, the study reports that employees with their knowledge, experience and resources needed to manage this flood of data and the tools they have will simply not be able to keep up in all growth areas.  IDC also estimates that by 2015 almost 20% of all digital information will pass through the „hands“ of cloud computing service providers, i.e. a given byte will at one point during its path from creation to deletion will be either saved or processed in the cloud.  Up to 10% of data will likely be maintained or stored in the cloud.