IDC predicts that by 2010, while nearly 70 percent of the digital universe will be created by individuals, businesses of all sizes, agencies, governments and associations will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability and compliance of at least 85 percent of that same digital universe. In 2006, just the e-mail traffic from one person to another (excluding spam) accounted for 6 exabytes (or 3 percent) of the world's data.

Notably, TheInfoPro's Wave-9 Survey of companies showed about 70 percent of corporate data is duplicates. TheInfoPro did not survey small companies or small home offices, the ranks of which represent 700,000 companies with revenue of US$200 million or less. But Robert Stevenson, managing director at TheInfoPro, estimated those small companies have from 500GB to 1TB of data today, and that they are experiencing the same exponential data growth as larger companies.

"That's why there's so much excitement around data de-duplication technology," Stevenson said. De-duplication technology eliminates copies of data, storing only one unique version.

According to IDC, most of the data today is being created by three major analog to digital conversions: film to digital image capture, analog to digital voice and analog to digital TV.

For example, two-year-old video-sharing Web site YouTube hosts 100 million digital video streams a day, and more than a billion digital songs a day are shared over the Internet in MP3 format. The CIO of Chevron Corp., John E. Bethancourt, says his company accumulates 2TB of data every day.