CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTS
“ The thing that people miss , or perhaps don ' t quite understand , is the sheer rate of creation of data in the world today ”
ANDY WALLS CTO , IBM FLASH SYSTEMS
Stopping “ Datageddon ” in the Zettabyte Age Ok , datageddon is a joke from the HBO show Silicon Valley - the ravings of an unhinged Jeff Bezos analogue - but for a joke made back in 2018 , it was surprisingly prescient .
Go back in time by about 40,000 years and the aggregate data produced by all of humanity in a given week might have amounted to between four and six cave paintings of buffalo .
In 2021 , the world generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day and , by 2025 , we ’ ll be generating around 175 zettabytes ( about 7trn Blu Ray copies of Blade Runner : The Final Cut ) per year .
“ The thing that people miss , or perhaps don ' t quite understand , is the sheer rate of creation of data in the world today ,” says Walls , adding that , with 5G adoption , the growth of social media , and the dramatic expansion of the internet of things ( IoT ), “ there is literally more data being created than can be stored . If you think it ' s hard to manage , store and analyse all the data created by seven billion people , just imagine what it ' s going to be like with 30 billion objects creating data .”
At the same time , our collective attitude towards data has changed . Walls explains that , back in the 1990 ’ s , at the birth of the internet , the true importance of data
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