HOPKINTON, USA: The world's information is more than doubling every two years, with a colossal 1.8 zettabytes to be created and replicated in 2011, which is growing faster than Moore's Law, finds a new EMC-sponsored IDC Digital Universe study.

Also Read: Unstructured data main source of data growth

The study, "Extracting Value from Chaos", finds that the forces behind this relentless growth are driven by technology and money. New "information taming" technologies are driving the cost of creating, capturing, managing and storing information down to one-sixth of what it was in 2005. Moreover, since 2005 annual enterprise investments in the Digital Universe, cloud, hardware, software, services, and staff to create, manage, store and generate revenue from the information, have increased 50 per cent to $4 trillion.

Massive server, data management and file growth not keeping pace with staffing: IDC notes that the skills, experience, and resources to manage the deluge of data and resources simply isn't keeping pace with all areas of growth.

Over the next decade (by 2020), IT departments worldwide will experience ten times the number of servers (virtual and physical), fifty times the amount of information to be managed, 75 times the number of files or containers that encapsulate the information in the digital universe, which is growing even faster than the information itself as more and more embedded systems, such as sensors in clothing, in bridges, or medical devices and 1.5 times the number of IT professionals available to manage it all.

Study Highlights:
Cloud computing cost and operational efficiency: While cloud computing accounts for less than two per cent of IT spending today, IDC estimates that by 2015 nearly 20 per cent of the information will be "touched" by cloud computing service providers, meaning that somewhere in a byte's journey from originator to disposal it will be stored or processed in a cloud. Perhaps as much as 10 per cent will be maintained in a cloud.

The digital shadow has a mind of its own: The amount of information individuals create themselves, writing documents, taking pictures, downloading music, etc., is far less than the amount of information being created about them in the digital universe.

The liability and responsibility is with enterprises: While 75 per cent of the information in the digital universe is generated by individuals, enterprises have some liability for 80 per cent of information in the digital universe at some point in its digital life.