BANGALORE, INDIA: Over the next decade (2010 to 2020), digital information in India will grow from 40,000 petabytes to 2.3 million petabytes, twice as fast as the worldwide rate. India’s share of digital information is expected to grow 60-fold by 2020.

This is according to data storage company EMC Corporation sponsored IDC Digital Universe Study 2010-11, titled "The Digital Universe in India”.

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“The digital information explosion will create significant challenges for India’s CIOs and IT managers for two reasons,” says Manoj Chugh, president, EMC India and SAARC and director, Global Accounts for EMC Asia Pacific & Japan. “First, enterprises have responsibility for the storage, protection and management of 80 percent of the digital universe’s data, and this liability will only increase as social networking and Web 2.0 technologies continue to impact the enterprise.

Key Findings
A good portion of this information will either reside in the cloud or pass through it.

India’s share of digital information is expected to grow 60-fold by 2020, driven by the roll-out of 3G/BWA networks, digitization of television networks, and increased technology adoption among individuals, SMBs, enterprises and in government services like the Unique ID project, census, among others.

India’s 2010 tally for digital information equals information stored in 2.5 billion iPads (16GB).

More than 464,000 separate towers of iPads (16GB) stacked flat on top of each other, each as high as India's famed Qutub Minar.

More than 600 million meters of iPads laid end-to-end, almost 10 times the length of the entire Indian railways network.

If the 2.5 billion iPads were laid end-to-end, they would be equal to a continuous line of more than 197 million Tata Nano cars.

Fifty percent more digital information is created today in India than the capacity that exists to store it. This number will grow to 80 percent over the next decade.

“Second, while digital information will grow 60-fold, enterprise investments in IT and staffing will grow only in single digits. The cumulative effect is driving CIOs to transform traditional infrastructures into private cloud data centers that offer internal and external customers IT as a service.”

He further added that: “The digital information deluge will translate into a significant market opportunity in India over the next decade. This is why EMC continues to invest in scaling its operations as a part of its previously announced USD2 billion investment commitment through 2014.