The Collapsing Digital Storage Universe

Just about every IT organization is struggling with data storage requirements to one degree or another. A new annual Digital Universe study from International Data Corp., conducted on behalf of EMC, isn’t likely to make IT professionals feel any better about the problem, unless you consider that misery tends to love company.

Of course, even though no one IT organization is responsible for the 1.8 trillion gigabytes (1.8 zettabytes) that it is estimated will be created in 2015, it’s still an awesome number to contemplate. The bigger question may be how long it will be before we reach the storage management crisis that will inevitably be brought on by IT's inability to keep pace with what appears to be an insatiable appetite for storage. At the current rate of consumption, it's only a matter of time before the proverbial Digital Universe starts to collapse on its own weight.

Click through for results from a digital universe study from International Data Corp., conducted on behalf of EMC.

It has grown by a factor of nine in five years.

1.2 Zettabytes, to be exact.

Enterprise IT has some liability associated with 80 percent of it.

But the IT staff is projected to grow only 1.5 times.

And only half the information is actually protected.

For example, shows we don’t wind up watching or voice messages never deleted.

And it’s more than doubling at a rate of every two years.

But still, enterprise organizations have spent $4 trillion on storage since 2005.

That’s up from 1,227 Exabytes in 2010.

The paradox is that over $5 trillion will still be spent.

While the amount of information to be managed will grow 50 times over.

That’s up from 2 percent today, with 1.4 Zettabytes touched by the cloud and 0.8 Zettabytes actually in the cloud.

That’s up from 10 percent today.