Data.

It has been called “the transformational equivalent to electricity a century ago[1]” and it is driving change through our economy, our management systems and our lives in ways fascinating and scary. 

Through device innovation (smartphones, smart cars, smart homes etc), instrumentation, interconnection and storage we now create an amazing volume of data in a very short period of time. Some estimates suggest we’ve already created, and have stored, over 10 zettabytes of data, and we are on track to have 50 zettabytes of data in storage by 2020 – just 3 years from now! 

IBM scientists estimate we create and capture 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, and based on that accelerated rate have created 90 percent of the 10 zettabytes presently captured in the last 2 years [2].   

But these terms, zettabytes and quintillion bytes all sound impossibly big or worse like villains in a b-grade spy move, so lets dig a bit deeper into how improbably big these numbers are. 

A quintillion bytes  is a 1 followed by 18 zeros – 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.   [3]

For comparison, and a number someone considering buying a house in a major city can at least visualize, a million is 1 followed by 6 zeros (1,000,000).   

A zettabyte is a 1 followed by 21 zeros – 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. 

Using the 2.5 quintillion bytes / day of new data estimate from IBM, and given there are 86,400 seconds in a day, that means we generate an average of 2.89E+13 bytes of data per second (2.5E+18 / 86,400 = 2.89E+13).   

If you assume that reading an email, for example, takes 60 seconds, then approximately 2.89E+13 x 60 = 1.74E+15 or 1.74 quadrillion bytes of data were created in that 60 second window. 

That’s a lot of data to store, analyze and generate insight from and the same volume is on its way in the next 60 seconds. 

Meaningful insight can be generated from data both big and small, that is created fast or slow. Competitive advantage comes from what you do with that data.

#DataDisrupts 

Footnotes: 

1. Microsoft “Data Driven” event / SQL Server 2016 launch keynote. March, 2016. 

2. https://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/what-is-big-data.html. Accessed 08.16.2016

3.  CAVEAT: I’m going to be a little loose on the use of the term byte just to illustrate a point. In computer terms a kilobyte is 1024 bytes but in basic numbers a kilo is a multiplier of 1,000. This is why a brand new 500 gigabyte hard drive only appears to your computer as 465 Gb of storage. For simplify, these are such big numbers that its easier to leave 1,000 vs 1,024 for a more detailed analysis, but keep in mind the math isn’t exact. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte