The big digital universe blowout

Here's a figure from analyst house IDC that's pretty mind-blowing: 161 exabytes (161 billion gigabytes) of digital information was created and copied globally in 2006. That's equivalent to about 3 million times the information in all the books ever written, or 12 stacks of books, each extending more than 93 million miles from the earth to the sun.

According to the EMC-sponsored research paper, information growth is exploding in all regions, with the Asia-Pacific growing faster than the worldwide average. IDC estimates that the emerging economies--Asia-Pacific, excluding Japan, and the rest of the world outside North America and Western Europe--now account for 10 percent of the digital universe, but will grow between 30 percent and 40 percent faster than mature economies.

If that doesn't grab you... Consider that between 2006 and 2010, the amount of digital information added annually will increase more than six times to 988 exabytes by the year 2010. What's fueling this information growth? Several factors including the growing usage of multimedia-intensive applications, the availability of the Internet and broadband, and the conversion of analog information such as film, voice calls and TV signals to digital format, says IDC. And, in 2007, the amount of information created will surpass, for the first time, the storage capacity available.

Incredible? Here are other worldwide findings from IDC's report:

• Images captured by more than one billion devices, including digital cameras, camera phones and medical scanners, make up the largest component of the digital universe.



• In 2006, the number of images captured on consumer digital still cameras exceeded 150 billion, while the number of images captured on cell phones hit almost 100 billion. IDC predicts that more than 500 billion images will be captured by 2010.



• The number of e-mail boxes grew from 253 million in 1998 to almost 1.6 billion in 2006. During this period, the number of e-mail messages sent grew three times faster than the number of people e-mailing.



• IDC is forecasting 250 million instant messaging accounts by 2010, including consumer accounts from which business instant messages are sent.



• Over 95 percent of the digital universe is unstructured data. In organizations, unstructured data accounts for more than 80 percent of all information.

Industry observers warn this explosive growth will put a strain on today's IT infrastructures. Already, the global ICT industry accounts for about 2 percent of the world's global carbon dioxide emissions, according to a Gartner study. This isn't a pretty scenario, and businesses in Asia should develop a plan to reduce energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions by adopting eco-friendly practices. Gartner's suggestions for an action plan include engaging staff in dialogue, measuring power consumption and carbon dioxide emissions, and developing green procurement guidelines.

Sounds like a tall order? Has your company started looking at energy consumption levels and ways to reduce e-waste? Drop me an e-mail to share your views.

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Eileen Yu

Eileen Yu began covering the IT industry when Asynchronous Transfer Mode was still hip and e-commerce was the new buzzword. These days, she gets stirred up over issues concerning Internet regulation, intellectual property rights and software patents, online privacy and data protection. Eileen is senior editor at ZDNet Asia, where she oversees the business tech news site.