World data seen to more than double every 2 years

People are only just starting to understand new technological trends such as virtualization and cloud computing, when along comes a phenomenon called “Big Data.”

That trend doesn’t really focus on burgeoning content or data encouraged by all those cloud activities. Big Data is all about tools and processes that allow organizations to manage and analyze very large data sets that yield insights from which the business may profit.

According to storage provider and cloud solution provider EMC, as more data are produced by consumers and organizations, Big Data will eventually provide opportunities for many organizations to harness intelligence from the data churned out every day through the Internet and other data sources.

Just how enormous is the data produced globally to really make organizations harness some good out of it?

An EMC-sponsored study done recently forecasts that the amount of data produced globally is doubling every two years and will reach 1.8 zettabytes, or 1.8 trillion gigabytes, by end of 2011.

That amount of data is already equivalent to over 200 billion HD movies, or the total amount of information needed to fill 57.5 billion 32 GB Apple iPads.

According to the EMC study, the massive growth of data is driven by technology and new money.

New “information taming” technologies are driving the cost of creating, capturing, managing and storing information down to a sixth of what it was in 2005.

In addition, the annual enterprise investment in the digital universe made by companies has increased 50 percent to $4 trillion since 2005.

Ronnie Latinazo, country manager of EMC Philippines, said by 2020 organizations will cull 50 times more information, but there may not be enough IT professionals to keep pace with the growth.

“IT staffing will be a major problem in the future,” said Latinazo.

Today, cloud computing only accounts for 2 percent of IT spending. But by 2015, nearly 20 percent of the information will be “touched” by cloud computing service providers.

As much as 10 percent of enterprise information will be maintained in a cloud.

The study also touched on the Philippine’s digital universe, particularly consumers’ addiction to Facebook here.

As of August, the number of Facebook subscribers has reached 25,995,960, and it continues to grow at a rate of 2.9 percent a month.

EMC predicts that by 2020, the amount of data uploaded by Filipino Facebook users will reach 94 petabytes. –Raquel P. Gomez, Philippine Daily Inquirer