Sunday, January 10, 2021

Data Tsunami: How big is the Data Deluge? (Part 1)

Was invited last year to speak about the Data Tsunami at the AICPA Engage conference, but I didn't quite make it there! Instead, I presented virtually

So, will be breaking out some of the topics that I will be discussing over a few blog posts. 

How big is the data tsunami?

Probably, the first thing that comes to mind is social data. The Internet truly unleashed the first torrent of the data tsunami. Google's search index alone is 100,000,000 GB. In terms, of social data we are looking at the following:

  • Twitter: 200 billion tweets per year (Twitter)
  • Facebook: 4 petabytes of data per day (WEF)
  • WhatsApp: 65 Billion Messages per day (WEF)
  • YouTube: 250 million hours per day (Variety)
  • Apple: 50 billion podcasts downloads (Fast Company
It's interesting how the data tsunami encompasses print, sight and sound. This is of course lends itself to analytics, but we will discuss that in a future post.

In terms of organizational data, Walmart generate 2.5 petabytes of data per hour. According to American Banker, 12 million petabytes (per year) of data flows through the financial industry. In terms of manufacturing, 6,000 fan blades manufactured by Rolls Royce generates 3 petabytes. It gives an idea of how much data is generated by the millions of parts that go into airplanes, trains and automobiles.

In terms of medical data, Stanford published the following

“The sheer volume of health care data is growing at an astronomical rate: 153 Exabyte…were produced in 2013 and an estimated 2,314 Exabyte will be produced in 2020, translating to an overall rate of increase at least 48 percent annually.”

This obviously has tremendous privacy concerns

How big will the data tsunami get? 

A couple of key contributors to this 'tsunami of data', will likely be the Internet of Things (IoT). 


IDC predicts that 40+ billion IoT devices will generate 79.4 ZB of data by 2025. The other generation of 'digital exhaust' will likely be autonomous vehicles, which according to Intel produce about 4 terabytes of data per hour

But the big question is so what?  

We'll take a look at this question in the next post. 

Author: Malik Datardina, CPA, CA, CISA. Malik works at Auvenir as a GRC Strategist that is working to transform the engagement experience for accounting firms and their clients. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent UWCISA, UW, Auvenir (or its affiliates), CPA Canada or anyone else.




 

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