The Expanding Digital Universe — A Forecast Of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010

The airwaves, telephone circuits, and computer cables are buzzing. Digital information surrounds us. We see digital bits on our new HDTVs, listen to them over the Internet, and create new ones ourselves every time we take a picture with our digital cameras. Then we email them to friends and family and create more digital bits.

There's no secret here. YouTube, a company that didn't exist just a few years ago, hosts 100 million video streams a day. Experts say more than a billion songs a day are shared over the Internet in MP3 format. Digital bits. London's 200 traffic surveillance cameras send 64 trillion bits a day to the command data center. Chevron's CIO says his company accumulates data at the rate of 2 terabytes – 17,592,000,000,000 bits – a day. TV broadcasting is going all-digital by the end of the decade in most countries. More digital bits.

What is a secret – one staring us in the face – is how much all these bits add up to, how fast they are multiplying, and what their proliferation imply.

This white paper, sponsored by EMC, is IDC's forecast of the digital universe – all the 1s and 0s created, captured, and replicated – and the implications for those who take the photos, share the music, and generate the digital bits and those who organize, secure, and manage the access to and storage of the information.