Forecast: 988 Billion Gigabytes of Digital Information in 2010
March 12, 2007
EMC Corporation has released an interesting forecast about the growth of digital information. The study includes research from the IDC that forecasts that 988 billion gigabytes of digital information will be created by 2010. The IDC is projecting six fold annual information growth from 2006 to 2010. Here are some key findings and projections from the research study.
Images: Images, captured by more than 1 billion devices in the world, from digital cameras and camera phones to medical scanners and security cameras, comprise the largest component of the digital universe.
Digital Cameras: The number of images captured on consumer digital still cameras in 2006 exceeded 150 billion worldwide, while the number of images captured on cell phones hit almost 100 billion. IDC is forecasting the capture of more than 500 billion images by 2010.
Camcorders: Camcorder usage should double in total minutes of use between now and 2010.
Email: The number of email mailboxes has grown from 253 million in 1998 to nearly 1.6 billion in 2006. During the same period, the number of emails sent grew three times faster than the number of people e-mailing; in 2006 just the email traffic from one person to another - i.e., excluding spam - accounted for 6 exabytes.
Instant Messaging: There will be 250 million IM accounts by 2010, including consumer accounts from which business IMs are sent.
Broadband: Today over 60% of Internet users have access to broadband circuits, either at home, at work or at school.
Internet: In 1996 there were only 48 million people routinely using the Internet. The Worldwide Web was just two years old. By 2006, there were 1.1 billion users on the Internet. By 2010, IDC expects another 500 million users to come online.
Unstructured Data: Over 95% of the digital universe is unstructured data. In organizations, unstructured data accounts for more than 80% of all information.
Compliance and Security: Today, 20% of the digital universe is subject to compliance rules and standards and about 30% is potentially subject to security applications.
Classification: IDC estimates that today less than 10% of organizational information is "classified," or ranked according to value. IDC expects the amount of classified data to grow better than 50% a year.
Emerging Economies: These now account for 10% of the digital universe but will grow 30-40% faster than mature economies.
