Every year, EMC sponsors an IDC study about the state of the expanding digital universe. My post about last year’s study is here. The data in this year’s study is just crazy!
For example:
- Last year, despite the global recession, the Digital Universe set a record. It grew by 62% to nearly 800,000 petabytes. A petabyte is a million gigabytes. Picture a stack of DVDs reaching from the earth to the moon and back.
- This year, the Digital Universe will grow almost as fast to 1.2 million petabytes, or 1.2 zettabytes. (There’s a word we haven’t had to use until now.)
- 25 quintillion information containers – packets, files, images, records, signals – that the bits in the Digital Universe will be in by 2020. (A quintillion is what comes after a quadrillion).
The press release for the study can be found here.
We have so much digital information that we are having to teach people new words just to describe the size of it! The study suggests we’ll need the things we’ll need just to deal with the quantity of data:
- Ways to add structure to unstructured data
- New storage and information management techniques
- More compliance tools
- Better security
Just who will manage all this information?
Of course that is where my interest lies. We know we’re facing such a huge increase in the amount of digital data, and we know the challenges we’ll have managing this tsunami of data. But do we have enough people with the skills that are going to be required to do manage the ginormous digital universe?
Let’s step back one step further – what are the skills required to manage and secure the information containers that make up the digital universe?
EMC Proven Professionals to the rescue!
My organization has played a role in this for a long time. The EMC Proven Professional program is designed to educate and train the folks who will be managing these information containers. Our educational program is role-based, which means our training is written with particular job duties in mind. Individuals can take a certification exam to verify what they learned in training, and become an EMC Proven Professional.
From this year’s Digital Universe study, I’d say we’re going to be busy evaluating if we need to adjust any of our training materials based on how job roles change to meet the needs to the expanding digital universe.
For my ed-tech friends, that is the E in ADDIE. I just had to say it! : )
Why should you care about this? All of the content you create – your videos, your pictures, your blog posts, the tweets that are part of #lrnchat, all of your data uploaded to a Ning network or to a Moodle instance, all of the comments your students make to message boards you set up for them to learn interactively, all of this adds to the digital universe.
If you want all that stuff to be available, affordable, and archived for the future, someone needs to be managing it. That’s what Proven Professionals do. If you are interested in getting Proven, check out this page. Or come and join us in the Proven Professional Community.
My next post will be about how the people responsible for managing all of this digital data actually feel about the Proven Professional program.