Staggering Revelations About Big Data

It is the stuff of e-documents, blogs, Tweets, news footage and fan forums. It is also a massive collection of family photos, music recordings, corporate webinars and podcasts, and, yes, Angry Birds and homemade videos of kittens. This and so much more continue to shape what we now know as big data. And big data is only going to get bigger and bigger, according to a recent report "Big Data, Bigger Digital Shadows, and the Biggest Growth in the Far East," from IDC. The report, conveys staggering numbers about the size of our digital universe. Even more telling are details that reveal the wealth of good data out there that remains unexploited by organizations for business purposes. The report is sponsored by EMC, a cloud-based provider of information storage, management, protection and analytics services. (Note: The findings measure big data in a unit of measurement known as the zettabyte (ZB), which equals 1,000 exabytes. That's enough to store 250 billion DVDs, according to an estimate from Cisco.)