Growth in Data Brings Opportunities for IT Pros

The amount of data in the world is more than doubling every two years, with an astounding 1.8 zettabytes expected to be generated and replicated this year alone. But that surge in data is also creating more opportunities for IT professionals, according to a recent study from EMC and IDC.

The study, “Extracting Value from Chaos,” found that the amount of data is growing faster than Moore’s law, the familiar concept created by Intel’s (News - Alert) Gordon Moore, which postulated that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit double every two years.

To put it in context, 1.8 zettabytes of data (a zettabyte is one billion terrabytes) is the same as everyone in the U.S. posting three tweets on Twitter (News - Alert) every minute for 26,796 years in a row, according to the study. That much data is also equal to more than 200 billion high-definition movies each two hours in length and would fill 57.5 billion 32GB Apple (News - Alert) iPads.

Okay, so it’s a heck of a lot of data. So how can this flood of information benefit IT pros? In a nutshell, someone is going to have to manage all that data.

Specifically, the study noted that new “information taming” technologies are slashing the costs of creating, capturing, managing, and storing data to one-sixth of what it was in 2005. And since then, enterprises have bumped up the amount of money they spend on hardware, software, staff, and other areas to store and generate sales from all this data by 50 percent to $4 trillion.

As a result, however, the staffing skills, resources, and experience needed to manage all that data isn’t keeping pace with all areas of the actual growth of that data.

Over the next ten years, IT departments around the world will see ten times the number of servers, both physical and virtual, that they have now. They’ll see 50 times the amount of information that must be managed and 75 times the number of files. Finally, they’ll need one and a half times the number of IT professionals required to manage all that data than they have now.

CIOs and their technical staff will also need to adopt new “information-taming” technologies, devise best practices for getting the greatest value from all the data, and create new roles to manage data, says the study.

“Each step will require organizational change, not just a few new computers or more software,” notes the study. “The success of many enterprises in the coming years will be determined by how successful CIOs are in driving the required enterprise-wide adjustment to the new realities of the digital universe.”

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