Grid-Tools

The zettabyte challenge

Posted on 06. Jul, 2010 by Huw Price in Test data

It is an impressive number. One zettabyte is equal to one million terabytes, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 individual bytes and a recent study claims that the world’s digital output has now smashed through that barrier.

The rapid expansion of the digital universe is a consequence of social networking and individuals creating their own digital content, such as online videos and digital photography.

Even though individuals are creating the bulk of digital material it is companies that are, in the main, storing it. We are now being told that the opportunity exists to build a detailed picture about each and every consumer through their digital interaction and that this arena will be crucial to marketing for the next decade.

In a fractured marketplace where individual likes and dislikes are expressed and increasingly finessed, the potential is there to mine and exploit user information.

In turn, inevitably, the demand will be that business databases respond with unprecedented agility and scope.

As the digital universe is forecast to expand by a factor of forty-four over the next decade, database marketing must be ready to rapidly evolve to meet consumer demands in this brave new world.