According to a new white paper from International Data, the amount of digital information created by 2006 was equal to about 3 million times the information on all books ever written, and between 2006 and 2010, the information added annually to the digital universe will increase from 161 exabytes to 988 exabytes. Fueling this are three major analog-to-digital conversions: film to digital image capture, analog to digital voice, and analog to digital TV. IDC predicts that by 2010, while nearly 70 percent of the digital universe will be created by individuals, organizations will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability, and compliance of at least 85 percent of that same digital universe. This rapidly expanding responsibility will put pressure on existing computing operations and drive organizations to develop more information-centric computing architectures. As a result, CIOs and IT managers will see the span of their domains increase exponentially, while information security and privacy protection will become a significant boardroom concern.

To learn more about the impact of data growth on IT departments:
- read this ComputerWeekly article