An exponential explosion in the amounts and types of digital data available has given rise to the term “big data.” This widely expanding digital realm has been fed, in part, by the fact that many aspects of our lives and pursuits have moved online, been made mobile with smartphones, are tracked by sensors, and new sources of data have been flooding in through social media, digital images, and video. Big data is also not just about the sheer volume of data, but the accelerating speed at which it is being created. To that point, a widely reported data statistic states that 90% of the world’s existing data has been created in the last 2 years! Just ponder that for a second.
To reinforce this sense of scale and speed, statisticians and researchers of all bents have come up with a wide array of mind boggling facts to chew on:
More data has been created in the past two years than in the entire previous history of the human race.
By the year 2020, about 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created every second for every human being on the planet.
Today, global IP traffic has reached 1.1 zettabytes – that’s a number with 21 zeroes after it. By 2020, global IP traffic is expected to grow to 44 zettabytes or 44trillion GBs!
How Much Data Are We Generating Every Day?
Digging a little deeper and compiling facts from Digitalcallout, we can see how much data our activities and behaviors are actually generating and adding to this flood of information:
Twitter: 500 million tweets per day = 15 billion characters = 12,000 copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix = average reader 20 years to read all tweets generated in one day
YouTube: 300 hours of videos are uploaded every minute = average viewer 50 years to watch all videos posted in a day
Facebook & Instagram: 350 million & 70 million photos being uploaded daily. Over all sites, we are sharing 1.8 billion images on a daily basis = at 3MB/image and iphone with 64 GB memory = 90,000 iPhones per day needed to store these images