Brace up for digital information boom

NEW DELHI, INDIA:  Digital information in India is expected to grow from 40,000 petabytes to 2.3 million petabytes within the next ten years. The growth is going to be twice as fast as the worldwide rate, said new findings by IDC Digital Universe Study, sponsored by EMC.

Titled "The Digital Universe in India”, the study revealed that 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.

According to the study, 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. A good portion of this information will either reside in the cloud or pass through it.

India’s 2010 tally for Digital Information equals information stored in 2.5 Billion iPads (16GB). 50 percent more digital information is created today in India than the capacity that exists to store it. This number will grow to 80 per cent over the next decade.

“The digital information explosion would create significant challenges for India’s CIOs and IT managers for two reasons,” said Manoj Chugh, president, EMC India and SAARC and Director of Global Accounts for EMC Asia Pacific and Japan. 

He added, “First, enterprises have responsibility for the storage, protection and management of 80 per cent 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. 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.”

To help address customers’ increasing challenges to store, protect and manage ever- growing digital information , EMC is rolling out its private cloud strategy in India and forging industry partnerships locally and globally to help customers move quickly toward private cloud computing environments and acquire new levels of agility, efficiency and control; expanding Global Services operations to address large enterprise requirements;  and broadening its product portfolio to cover the entire spectrum of enterprise, SMB (small and medium business), SOHO (small office, home office) and consumer segments.