Big Data: 25 Amazing Need-to-Know Facts

We surely see a lot of hype surrounding big data but I believe the following 25 facts speak for themselves and help to paint a realistic picture of the phenomenon we now call ‘Big Data’ – a phenomenon that is changing the world as we know it.

We surely see a lot of hype surrounding big data but I believe the following 25 facts speak for themselves and help to paint a realistic picture of the phenomenon we now call ‘Big Data’ – a phenomenon that is changing the world as we know it.

1. Every 2 days we create as much information as we did from the beginning of time until 2003 [Source]
2. Over 90% of all the data in the world was created in the past 2 years. [Source]
3. It is expected that by 2020 the amount of digital information in existence will have grown from 3.2 zettabytes today to 40 zettabytes. [Source]
4. The total amount of data being captured and stored by industry doubles every 1.2 years [Source]
5. Every minute we send 204 million emails, generate 1,8 million Facebook likes, send 278 thousand Tweets, and up-load 200 thousand photos to Facebook [Source]
6. Google alone processes on average over 40 thousand search queries per second, making it over 3.5 billion in a single day. [Source]
7. Around 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and it would take you around 15 years to watch every video uploaded by users in one day. [Source]
8. Facebook users share 30 billion pieces of content between them every day. [Source]
9. If you burned all of the data created in just one day onto DVDs, you could stack them on top of each other and reach the moon – twice. [Source]
10. AT&T is thought to hold the world’s largest volume of data in one unique database – its phone records database is 312 terabytes in size, and contains almost 2 trillion rows. [Source]
11. 570 new websites spring into existence every minute of every day. [Source]
12. 1.9 million IT jobs will be created in the US by 2015 to carry out big data projects. Each of those will be supported by 3 new jobs created outside of IT – meaning a total of 6 million new jobs thanks to big data. [Source]
13. Today’s data centres occupy an area of land equal in size to almost 6,000 football fields. [Source]
14. Between them, companies monitoring Twitter to measure “sentiment” analyze 12 terabytes of tweets every day. [Source]
15. The amount of data transferred over mobile networks increased by 81% to 1.5 exabytes (1.5 billion gigabytes) per month between 2012 and 2014. Video accounts for 53% of that total. [Source]
16. The NSA is thought to analyze 1.6% of all global internet traffic – around 30 petabytes (30 million gigabytes) every day [Source]
17. The value of the Hadoop market is expected to soar from $2 billion in 2013 to $50 billion by 2020, according to market research firm Allied Market Research. [Source]
18. The number of Bits of information stored in the digital universe is thought to have exceeded the number of stars in the physical universe in 2007. [Source]
19. This year, there will be over 1.2 billion smart phones in the world (which are stuffed full of sensors and data collection features), and the growth is predicted to continue. [Source]
20. The boom of the Internet of Things will mean that the amount of devices that connect to the Internet will rise from about 13 billion today to 50 billion by 2020. [Source]
21. 12 million RFID tags – used to capture data and track movement of objects in the physical world – had been sold in by 2011. By 2021, it is estimated that number will have risen to 209 billion as the Internet of Things takes off. [Source]
22. Big data has been used to predict crimes before they happen – a “predictive policing” trial in California was able to identify areas where crime will occur three times more accurately than existing methods of forecasting. [Source]
23. By better integrating big data analytics into healthcare, the industry could save $300bn a year, according to a recent report – that’s the equivalent of reducing the healthcare costs of every man, woman and child by $1,000 a year. [Source]
24. Retailers could increase their profit margins by more than 60% through the full exploitation of big data analytics. [Source]
25. The big data industry is expected to grow from US$10.2 billion in 2013 to about US$54.3 billion by 2017. [Source]

I hope you found these facts interesting, inspiring and maybe a little scary? As always, please let me know your views on the topic.

I have also put together this slide deck with these 25 facts, which you can download or share:

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For more, please check out my other posts in The Big Data Guru column and feel free to connect with me via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Slideshare and The Advanced Performance Institute.