Datasheet

15
Chapter 1: Defining Data Loss
The amount of information created, captured, or replicated in 2007 exceeded
available storage for the first time. Suppose that currently the amount of
new technical information is doubling every year. If all things remain equal
(and they won’t), those growth numbers tell us that by the end of 2010, the
amount of information will be doubling every 72 hours. Which is amazing or
ridiculous, depending on your perspective.
If, in 2006, we created 161 exabytes of digital information — three million
times the information in all the books ever written (and currently we are pub-
lishing around 3,000 books worldwide — daily), here’s what that would look
like if we literally piled it up: a stack of books from outside your back door to
the sun and back — six times. That’s 93×12 or 1,116 million miles of books.
In one year. That’s a cosmically awful amount of stuff we’ve got to store and
protect — all of it with major implications for individuals, businesses, and
society in general.
✓ The great mass of information will put a considerable strain on the IT
infrastructures that organizations have in place today. (Got it in one,
Sherlock!)
✓ This huge growth will change how organizations and IT professionals do
their jobs, and how we consumers use information. (Of course it will! We
must be geniuses!)
Who are we kidding? The numbers just scream at you: over 2.7 billion Google
searches performed every month (by the way, to whom did we refer these
searches B.G. [Before Google]?) Every year we cumulatively wait 32 billion
hours for Internet pages to load. We simply can’t survive without this stuff.
Even if IT bursts at the seams, we’ve got to have our information. But if IT
succumbs, we won’t have our information. So . . .
Where will it all end?
Somebody’s got to get smart about this — we must take steps, as an industry
and as individuals, to make sure that we create infrastructures that make
information secure, reliable, scalable, and highly available. The name of that
game is information management, and it won’t get easier. Organizations will
have to use more sophisticated techniques to manage, store, secure, and
protect their information if they expect to survive. To handle the increased
amounts of information that we’ll have to protect, store, and manage in the
future, we have to start now — by getting control of the information we
already have.
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