05 Jul 2009
To Pluto and back
Richard Wray, writing recently in The Guardian, pointed out that the volume of data held is now estimated at 487 billion GB. To put this in perspective he explained that in printed form this would form a pile that would stretch to Pluto 10 times over. The really staggering statistic, however, was that if this data were printed then the stack would grow faster than NASA’s fastest rocket. I haven’t checked the stats, but a quick back of the envelope calculation suggests he’s in the right order of magnitude.
What does this mean? Apart from the staggering numbers, it tells us that the problem for organisations isn’t holding large amounts of information – they already do that. Nor is the problem necessarily how to index that information – increasingly they have defined information standards to do that. The real problem is its continual growth – very few taxonomies or models properly account for the rapid rate of growth.
MIKE2.0 hosts a new generation of Information Management techniques which are designed to deal less with the data you have now and more with the data that you are likely to gain in the future. A great place to start is with the SAFE architecture.
July 6th, 2009 at 11:46 pm
Rob – that means nearly 100 GB (the capacity on a modern laptop for every person on earth …). Amazing stats and actually higher than I have heard before. Do you have a link to the article online – I couldn’t find it in Richard’s column (a search issue!)
I agree, the cost to manage these volumes to get the information you will grow at similar rates without the right models / architectures to get access to key information … Without a requirements-driven approach and solid information architecture, just capturing and indexing all this data doesn’t do much except add to your bottom line.
July 15th, 2009 at 8:16 am
Hi Rob – I love this stuff – but “in printed form” – a little old school methinks. In rich media terms it is roughly 104 billion copies of ‘Police Academy’ (including the DVD extras). This would allow you to watch it continuously (104 billion times) while you travel to Pluo and back. Or you watch all seven Police Academy movies (#2 is my favourite) 15 billion times.
On a serious note – the change in balance between poor-media and rich-media is probably driving a large component of this growth – perhaps genuine information is not growing at such a rapid pace.
Jon
July 19th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Sean,
The original article is http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/may/18/digital-content-expansion, it actually isn’t as amazing as it sounds when you think about the volume of digital data that moves around in addition to the content we keep at home. Think, for instance, of all the digital photos and other multimedia content the western world keeps as well as specific application material such as medical imaging. The other point is that much (most?) of the material is duplicated or rubbish or both.
Cheers, Rob