That is 485 billion GB of
porn
The World Wide Wibble is now made up of 486 billion gigabytes
worth of data, according to bean counters IDC.
According to the Guardian
newspaper if that data were bound into books it would create a stack that would
stretch from the Earth to Pluto ten times. The stack of books is apparently
growing faster than Nasa's fastest space rocket. Part of the reason is that
large files from digital cameras and the world's army of surveillance cameras
are sucking up bandwidth. Another reason is the increase in machine to
machine communications in Internet transactions.
IDC thinks that the digital
universe is expected to double in size over the next 18 months thanks to a rise
in the number of mobile phones. Last year the world's total digital content was
161bn gigabytes. Despite the business use of the world wide wibble, more than
70 per cent of the information in the digital universe is created by individuals
and includes phone calls, emails, photos, online banking transactions or
postings on social networking sites, including Twitter.
The job of
protecting the vast majority of this content lies with corporations and
organisations with more than 30 per cent of data requiring heavy
security. IDC/EMC estimate that the cost of the computers, networks and
storage facilities that drive the digital universe is about $6 Trillion.