If you’re anything like Lisbeth Salander in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”, you are rather particular about how and where you store your data. Now you do not have to have her social and personality issues to justify your paranoia healthy concern about your data. In fact, it is important that even the average person take care of information that is uploaded on the Internet.
With the continuing rise of social networking and other similar activities online, information security is really something that everyone should pay attention to. You don’t have to an expert in this matter – a good dose of common sense and accurate information should be enough for everyday purposes. And if you have those two elements, you ought to be safe. You also will probably be interested in this infographic about the whereabouts of the world’s data that Mozy has come up with. ((Source)) Yes, it’s the same Mozy that offers online backup services. And no, this is not a sponsored post by them. Suffice it to say that I found myself poring over the infographic and thought that some of you might be interested in the data as well.
Here are the salient points in the infographic.
There are almost 600 Exabytes of data stored all over the world today. Exa-what? My thoughts exactly. My knowledge of math doesn’t go that far, so Wikipedia had to rescue me. Exa = 1018 or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. Ack. Now this really calls for something more visual. Imagine putting all that data in books. Now imagine 13 layers of books covering the entire United States. Or China. That’s how much information there is. Mind-blowing to say the least.
Hard drives contain most of the world’s data. Fifty-two percent of the world’s data is stored in hard disks. Optical storage devices come second at 28%. Not surprising at all, is it?
The rise of the data centers – 8 of the 10 biggest data centers in the world are in the United States. The other 2 are in Europe.
As for me, I belong to the majority – hard disks FTW! And I guess being a regular Facebook et. al. user (like everyone and their mom), I have a fair amount of data in one data center or another as well.