By 2020, there will be 5,200 GB of data for every person on Earth

Only 15% of data volition be stored in the cloud by 2020

Senior Reporter, Computerworld |

During the next viii years, the amount of digital information produced will exceed xl zettabytes, which is the equivalent of 5,200 GB of information for every man, woman and child on Globe, according to an updated Digital Universe written report released today.

To put information technology in perspective, twoscore zettabytes is xl trillion gigabytes -- estimated to exist 57 times the amount of all the grains of sand on all the beaches on earth. To hit that effigy, all data is expected to double every two years through 2020.

The majority of information between at present and 2020 volition non be produced past humans just by machines as they talk to each other over data networks. That would include, for example, machine sensors and smart devices communicating with other devices.

So far, however, but a tiny fraction of the data being produced has been explored for its value through the use of data analytics. IDC estimates that by 2020, as much equally 33% of all data will contain information that might exist valuable if analyzed.

The Digital universe explained

The digital universe includes everything from images and videos on mobile phones uploaded to YouTube to digital movies populating the pixels of loftier-definition TVs to transponders recording highway tolls. Information technology also, naturally, includes more traditional corporate data, such as banking data swiped in an ATM, security footage at airports and major events such as the Olympic Games, as well as subatomic collisions recorded past the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Using business organization intelligence to analyze data could reveal patterns in social media use, correlations in scientific information from detached studies, medical data intersected with sociological information, as well every bit faces in security footage.

"Herein is the promise of 'Big Data' or MapReduce technology -- the extraction of value from the large untapped pools of data in the digital universe," IDC said in the written report.

Additionally, data that would be mined has to exist "tagged" with meta information to give information technology context. That would include, for instance, calculation a date stamp to video surveillance or geolocation information to smartphone photos or video --"basically, some information that puts context around the data we're creating," said Chuck Hollis, global marketing CTO at EMC.

"We're not only going to have to tag more than of it, but nosotros're going to take to tag it with better information over time if we desire to excerpt data with value from it," he said.

That opens up a burgeoning career field for data scientists, who will be asked to extrapolate useable information from massive data stores such as consumer ownership trends.

Picking upward speed

The Digital Universe study, which is sponsored past EMC, was starting time launched in 2005. For the offset three years, it was refreshed on an almanac basis. This latest update, however, marks an xviii-month lag between written report results -- and a huge change in its predictions.

For example, the last version, released in June 2011, predicted the amount of data to exist produced past 2020 would exist 35 zettabytes, not xl zettabytes.

Hollis said the new IDC study reveals that for every physical or virtual server corporations have today, they tin can plan on having x times that number by the cease of the decade.