Introduction:
There is no denying it, we are living in the era of digital transformation, every decision in our lives is driven by vast amount of information made possible by astonishing advancements in technology (EMC, 2014). With 11 billion devices connected to the internet, 2.5 Exabytes of data are produced daily with an expected total amount of data to reach 44 zettabytes (44 trillion gigabytes) by 2020 (Gant, 2007).
Digital Universe:
I like to compare the current era of digital transformation to the big bang theory and how our universe is still expanding rapidly (Adams, 2008). It is estimated that in 2020 the number of bits will equal the number of stars in the observable universe which is 1 billion trillion (University of California, 2015),the number is really impressive, but hold on, the expansion rate of data (bits) is far greater than the expansion rate of the universe so how, when, where, and why are we storing so much data and how will this all end.
Stars have an expanding universe always giving space for new stars to form and for the existing ones to live a very long life yet we on earth have very limited space and much lower technological capabilities so where is all of this data being stored, how are we benefiting from this vast amount of unstructured data!?, and what will eventually happen when we run out of space!?
Digital transformation:
Hard Disks (HDD, SSD, NVMe, Flash) which remain until now the main target for storing data are advancing at a steady rate but a slow one in comparison with the growth rate of data (Fingerhut, 2014). Hyper-Converged infrastructure appliances which work by combining compute and storage into a single device have been introduced with web-scale architecture to solve elasticity and agility challenges faced with vendors dealing with very big chunks of data like Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (Haight, 2013). 100 GB networks are becoming a trend with cloud and big data vendors allowing them to transfer vast amount of data at higher speed than even before with low latency. CPU is no more following Moore`s law to some extent in technological advancement allowing for faster processing of data using smaller devices (Simonite, 2016).
IoT (Internet of things), Big Data, and AI (Artificial Intelligence) are driving data from the software side of things. The more data we have the better, never the less, we need to make sense of it and use it for more technological advancement resulting in eventually enhancing all aspects of our lives. The amount of data being produced daily cannot be perceived even by joining the whole of mankind for the task, because of that we need big data systems to take care of unstructured data by making sense of it and passing it to artificial intelligence systems where understandable data is put into hardware/software that impact us directly (Bloomberg, 2017). IoT is the driver of information from different aspects of our lives, we now connect our health , house appliances, cars, and literally any thing to the internet, data from any IoT device ( using sensors and transmitters ) is collected, stored, analyzed, made sense of, and action-ed on in different areas such artificial intelligence.
The End:
Scientists formulate 3 hypotheses for how the universe will end. It might keep on expanding infinitely while galaxies keep drifting apart until no other galaxy is visible after which starts within our galaxy start to die, it might stop expanding in which ultimately our sun will run out of hydrogen and die, or it might stop expanding and start shrinking in which eventually every galaxy will be demolished (Aron, 2016).
How will the digital transformation era of ever expanding data end!?
References
Adams, D. J., 2008. An Introduction to Galaxies and Cosmology. Cambridge University Press, p. 224.
Aron, J., 2016. When will the universe end? Not for at least 2.8 billion years. [Online]
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Gant, J. F., 2007. A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010. [Online]
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Haight, C., 2013. Enter Web-scale IT. [Online]
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Simonite, T., 2016. Moore’s Law Is Dead. Now What?. [Online]
Available at: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601441/moores-law-is-dead-now-what/
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University of California, 2015. About how many stars are in space?. [Online]
Available at: http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=3775
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