The airwaves, telephone circuits, and computer cables are buzzing. Digital information surrounds us. We see digital bits on our new HDTVs, listen to them over the Internet, and create new ones ourselves every time we take a picture with our digital cameras. Then we email them to friends and family and create more digital bits. There's no secret here. YouTube, a company that didn’t exist just a few years ago, hosts 100 million video streams a day. i Experts say more than a billion songs a day are shared over the Internet in MP3 format. ii Digital bits. London's 200 traffic surveillance cameras send 64 trillion bits a day to the command data center. iii Chevron's CIO says his company accumulates data at the rate of 2 terabytes – 17,592,000,000,000 bits – a day. iv TV broadcasting is going all-digital by the end of the decade in most countries. More digital bits. What is a secret – one staring us in the face – is how much all these bits add up to, how fast they are multiplying, and what their proliferation imply. This White Paper, sponsored by EMC, is IDC's forecast of the digital universe – all the 1s and 0s created, captured, and replicated – and the implications for those who take the photos, share the music, and generate the digital bits and those who organize, secure, and manage the access to and storage of the information. Some of the key findings: • In 2006, the amount of digital information created,

or 281 billion gigabytes) — was 10 % bigger than we thought. The resizing comes as a result of faster growth in cameras, digital TV shipments, and better understanding of information replication. • By 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006. • As forecast, the amount of information created, captured, or replicated exceeded available storage for the first time in 2007. Not all information created and transmitted gets stored, but by 2011, almost half of the digital universe will not have a permanent home. • Fast-growing corners of the digital universe include those related to digital TV, surveillance cameras, Internet access in emerging countries, sensor-based applications, datacenters supporting “cloud computing, ” and social networks.