Five facts about data

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Recession busting

The market for data integration software defied the economic downturn to grow by 15% between 2010 and 2011. Research firm Gartner, in their report Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools, size the market at $1.9 billion at the end of 2011.  Gartner notes, however, that “the forecast growth in 2012 is expected to slow considerably as the uncertain macroeconomic environment drives increased caution in organizations”.

How many bytes?

The worldwide growth of digital data has driven current global storage capacity to around 295 exabytes, according to a study conducted by the University of Southern California.  In case you’re wondering, an exabyte equals one billion gigabytes.  To quote Lachlan James in his post digital data explosion highlights need for new-age Database and Business Intelligence technologies: “Picture a stack of CD-ROMs reaching from the floor beneath your desk to 80,000 kilometers beyond the moon”.

Risky business

According to research by Bloor (Data Migration 2011), 38% of data migration projects overrun or are aborted. This figure sounds high, but is a dramatic improvement to the 80% of projects reported to have failed when Bloor conducted similar research in 2007.  These changes are attributed to a greater use of data migration best practices.  For instance, Bloor found in its latest survey that there is an uptake in the use of data profiling and cleansing tools.  Meanwhile, companies not using a data integration tool have a 50% chance of failure.

Too big to fail

The explosion of data and our increasing reliance on data centres has real economic consequences when failure occurs.  Data infrastructure company Emerson Network Power calculates that “if all 509,147 data centers went out 2.5 times (based on an average) for a duration of 134 minutes, that would equal 2,842,737 hours of downtime, at a total loss of $426 billion a year. That’s enough to buy every person in Munich, Germany, a yacht”.

Data has a weight too

The data on the internet can be weighed.  Translated into energy, specifically electrons, the mass of the internet is two ounces, according to physicist Russell Seitz.   More information can be found in this post by Robert Kulwich: Let’s Weigh The Internet (Or Maybe Let’s Not), who concludes: “So the Internet weighs about as much as a strawberry? It can still stop tanks.”

For more information on how we can help tackle your data, book a consultation with one of our data management experts.

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