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One of the hottest areas in the cloud computing space has been the offering of storage-on-demand services. The arena now includes such heavyweights as IBM, AT&T, EMC, Symantec, Amazon and Iron Mountain.
What's behind the red-hot focus in this area? The simple fact that demand for digital storage continues to outpace projections, even in the midst of a global recession.
At the EMC World gathering in Orlando this week, John Gantz the chief research officer for IDC shared a number: 3,892,179,868,480,350,000,000. "That's the number of new digital information bits created in 2008," says Gantz. "Contrary to popular belief, as the economy deteriorated the pace of digital information created and transmitted over the Internet, phone networks and airwaves actually increased."
According to the IDC study, titled "As the Economy Contracts, the Digital Universe Expands," the amount of digital information stored in 2008 grew 3% faster than IDC's prior projection. Looking forward, the digital universe is expected to double every 18 months.
By 2012, five times as much digital information will be created versus 2008.
The end result, of course, is that organizations of all shapes and sizes are struggling with how they will manage their overflowing data needs. In 2008, most IT budgets remained flat or declined, creating an even larger divide between the amount of information created and the ability to manage it.
Cloud offerings, like those announced by EMC this week, offer an increasingly appealing alternative.
Here are some other interesting bites pulled from the data storage survey:
- Over the next four years mobile users will grow by a factor of three; 600 million more people will become Internet surfers, and nearly two-thirds of all Internet users will use mobile devices at least some of the time.
- More than 30% of the information crated today is security-sensitive. That number will grow to 45% in 2012.
- Non traditional IT devices, such as wireless meters, automobile navigation systems, industrial machines, and intelligent sensors, will grow by a factor of 3.6
- Interactions between people via email, messaging and social networks, will grow by a factor of eight.
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