The Zettabyte Era (Infographic)

We all know what happens in the digital world in a minute. For those of you who don’t know, check out this awesome infographic published by Domo.

As visualized, some of the mind blowing facts are:

• Every minute 72 hours of videos are uploaded to Youtube
• 204 million emails are sent
• Google receives over 4 million search queries
• Facebook users share close to 2.5 million pieces of content
• Over 300,000 photos are being shared through whatsapp
• Tinder users swipe more than 416,667 times and so on.

In a nutshell, every time we click on the like button or share or publish or tweet, we are adding up to the data pool stored in data centers across the globe. Most of the web and mobile applications capture huge amount of data in this way, store them and use this data to study and understand user behaviour. This way, they keep improvising and strive to provide better user experience. All this had led to the era of Zettabyte. According to an IDC report, the world officially entered the zettabyte era in 2012 when the amount of data created was about 2.8 zettabytes.

What is a Zettabyte ? 

1 Zettabyte (ZB) = 1024 Exabytes (EB).
Wherein 1 Exabyte = 1 million Terabytes (TB) of data.

Still not getting how big it is ? Its quite natural to get confused around the physical and temporal ramifications of such numbers – unless you are a techie. Lets have a different perspective on this.

One Zettabyte equals 1024 Exabytes.

One Exabyte is more than sufficient to store the entire Netflix catalog of movies, sitcoms, standup comedy shows, documentaries and every single video for more than 3000+ times (or) it is the amount of memory required to hold over 36,000 years worth of Full HD quality videos. In other words, you can store data equivalent to 250 billion DVDs in a zettabyte.

Now you got the point of how massive it is ?  Great.

The Past

If we look a little back in time, until 2005, all across the internet, people were sharing images, videos and hefty files using peer-to-peer file sharing mode. After 2005, when Internet speeds shot up exponentially in developed economies, cloud based services came into existence. Thereon, internet traffic was primarily towards data centers as user base grew along with growth in Internet speed.

Users found it to be efficient, cost effective and were happy to store, modify and access data in the cloud, which basically means, storing them in a data center. They also found it incredibly easier to access the cloud through thin clients. Data began to grow in leaps and bounds from that point of time and sophisticated data compression methodologies were researched, tested and implemented. Now, lets see what impact it has on our Internet and data traffic.

Approaching the Zettabyte Era

A recent report by Cisco provides a holistic view about the data explosion along with IP traffic forecasts. “Approaching the Zettabyte Era” is one part of the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI).