The exploding digital universe - Digits - WSJ

“Like the physical universe, the digital universe is expanding. In fact, exploding,” says John Gantz, a researcher for IDC. For the last three years, Mr. Gantz has been commissioned by storage provider EMC to count the number of bits created each year. And each year he reports that IDC previously underestimated the explosion of information.

This is good for EMC, but it’s probably not so good for the CIOs of the world. They’re the ones who have to find room in their shrunken budgets to buy the disk arrays to store all this stuff that’s being created by employees, customers and their devices. IDC says budgets for servers and storage are shrinking by 6% this year...