More than 369 exabytes of information have been created since the beginning of 2008, more than double the amount in all of 2006, according to EMC's .

Data creation is growing by 60% each year, in good economic times and bad, Hollis noted. Another speaker, Executive Vice President Madge Meyer of State Street Corporation in Boston, said her organization acquires 40TB of new information each month.

The burden is falling heavily on storage administrators, particularly when it comes to securing all this information, said IT industry consultant Richard Austin.

"The information that has become the crown jewels of the modern enterprise is completely coming under the control and responsibility [of storage professionals]," he said.

Even as storage costs go down on a per-byte basis, businesses are spending more on storage each year because of data growth and power consumption. Diane Bryant, vice president and CIO of , said her company predicts it will double its storage spending by 2012.