If predictions by the experts are true (which, by every indication, they are spot on), the time to plan for a massive, humongous, tremendous, exceedingly large influx of data is now, if not sooner. The data is coming. Forget winter, it’s data you have to be worried about.
Brace Yourselves … Yottabytes are Coming
Most businesses simply don’t have the infrastructure in place to handle data measured in yottabytes or zettabytes.
The amount of data that businesses will be forced to contend with in the very near future (within two to four years) is so big that we don’t even have good names to define that amount of data yet. Most organizations are currently dealing in terms of terabytes (1,000,000,000,000 bytes) or perhaps petabytes (1,000,000,000,000 bytes). Soon, however, they will be trying to collect, store, and manage exabytes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes), zettabytes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes), and yottabytes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes). (Fun fact: yottabytes were named for Yoda.)
After that, the waters get a bit murky. Some names have been tossed around, such as brontobyte, or a thousand yottabytes, as well as geopbytes, which would be a thousand brontobytes. Someone even proposed hellabytes, that is, a hell of a lot of bytes — or more precisely, a thousand yottabytes. Other prospective names include ninabytes, for one thousand yottabytes, and tenabytes, which would be bigger than that, but at this point we’re already way past what normal people can picture having to deal with.
IoT and Mobile and Social, Oh My!
Where is all the data coming from? Most businesses are already dealing with or at least looking into big data solutions, such as Hadoop and data lakes. There is value in the unstructured data that resides in most companies, such as archived emails and saved files such as presentations, advertisements, research reports, and the like. Social media data is growing in importance for marketing and customer service purposes, and holds lots of promise for product development, quality control, and other operational challenges. Add to this mix the IoT, or Internet of Things, which will play a prominent role as companies get on board with Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
We Feel the Need, the Need for Better Storage Media
Onsite storage isn’t the only challenge. Businesses will need efficient means for backing up and analyzing all that data, to
The problem is, the current technologies just aren’t yet up to handling these amounts of data. Disk storage is too slow and would take up far too much space. A newer storage technology is in the works, called Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording or HAMR, but that won’t likely be available by 2020 when most experts believe we will be dealing with some 400 zettabytes of data incoming from the IoT. Currently, the only media capable of this kind of storage is tape, which isn’t extraordinarily fast but is getting the job done in some companies that are already handling massive volumes of data, such as Google.
Will the cloud play a significant role in handling the massive influx of corporate and organizational data? Or, will cloud service providers (faced with the same limiting technologies as any other business) simply limit their offerings and charge premium prices for storage? That remains to be seen. What is clear, is that businesses need to begin now to plan for handling and storing these quantities of data. That all begins with a solid backup solution. Learn more about Backbox and how they can protect your data today.