March 2007, An IDC White Paper
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The airwaves, telephone circuits, and computer cables are buzzing. Digital information surrounds us. We see digital bits on our new HDTVs, listen to them over the Internet, and create new ones ourselves every time we take a picture with our digital cameras. Then we email them to friends and family and create more digital bits.
There's no secret here. YouTube, a company that didn’t exist just a few years ago, hosts 100 million video streams a day. Experts say more than a billion songs a day are shared over the Internet in MP3 format.ii Digital bits. London's 200 traffic surveillance cameras send 64 trillion bits a day to the command data center. Chevron's CIO says his company accumulates data at the rate of 2 terabytes – 17,592,000,000,000 bits – a day.iv TV broadcasting is going all-digital by the end of the decade in most countries. More digital bits.
What is a secret – one staring us in the face – is how much all these bits add up to, how fast they are multiplying, and what their proliferation imply.
This White Paper, sponsored by EMC, is IDC's forecast of the digital universe – all the 1s and 0s created, captured, and
replicated – and the implications for those who take the photos, share the music, and generate the digital bits and those who organize, secure, and manage the access to and storage of the information.
HOW BIG IS THE DIGITAL UNIVERSE?
The IDC sizing of the digital universe – information that is either created or captured in digital form and then replicated in 2006 – is 161 exabytes, growing to 988 exabytes in 2010, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 57%
(Figure 1).
About one quarter of the digital universe is original (pictures recorded, keystrokes in an email, phone calls), while three quarters is replicated (emails forwarded, backed up transaction records, Hollywood movies on DVD).
A majority of these bits represent images, both moving and still. This is because one digital camera image can generate a megabyte or more of digital information, and video or digital TV can generate a dozen megabytes per second.
Voice signals, on the other hand, can be carried at less than one megabyte a second; and it would take a good typist more than a day and a half to produce a megabyte of keystrokes.
Although many of the images created are by individuals, they enter an organization’s domain in email systems, in Web postings, and in applications from medical imaging and public safety surveillance to compound documents supporting insurance claims, recorded Web conferences, and advertising and marketing content.
To give you an idea of where all these exabytes come from, just consider the number of devices or subscribers in the world that can create or capture information.
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