EMC Report Calculates Explosive Growth of Information

Hopkinton-based EMC Corp. issued a report Friday that the world's information is more than doubling every two years, according to an online story in The Business Journal Daily of Youngstown, Ohio.

The EMC report means 1.8 zettabytes of data will be created and replicated in 2011.

1.8 zettabytes of data, the BJD says, is equivalent to every person in the United States tweeting three tweets per minute for 26,976 years.

The EMC report, "Extracting Value from Chaos" says the data explosion is fueled by technology and money.

In the past five years, what EMC calls "information taming" technology has driven down the cost of creating and storing data to one-sixth of what it was.

At the same time, investments in ways to store and manage data have risen by more than a trillion dollars to $4 trillion.

Still, according to the BJD and EMC, information technology can't keep up with the data explosion.

That has led EMC, and others, to create new tools to help businesses gain insight from this data glut. The tools create metadata - data about data - using pattern recognition somewhat like programs that tag Facebook photos.

The EMC report also said less than a third of the information in the digital universe has minimal security or protection. 

Jeremy Burton, the chief marketing officer at EMC, said in the report that the relentless growth of data will drive transformational change in all aspects of our lives and the way we do business.