About Custom Solutions

Custom Solutions is a team of content-based marketing consultants dedicated to helping you leverage relevant IDC content and our custom services in your marketing initiatives. Throughout each engagement we provide insights and best practices on achieving the best results with your selected program elements.

Our expertise, flexible business model, and range of offerings enables our team to support your marketing programs from a single call-to-action incentive to a broad global media campaign.

Independence is the Key

The opinion, analysis, and research results presented in Custom Solutions deliverables are drawn from research and analysis independently conducted and published by IDC, unless otherwise and explicitly noted. A license to distribute IDC content does not imply an opinion about or endorsement of the licensee or its products and services. This ongoing commitment to independent and reliable research makes IDC one of the most sought after sources of IT industry intelligence and advice.

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About iView

A market overview in a quick-reference, mixed-content, and mixed media format (e.g., data, bullets, analyst quotes, audio, video, and/or graphics). Provides audience-essential data and analyst commentary on want-to-know and need-to-know market considerations.

Copyright & Restrictions

Any IDC Information or reference to IDC that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from IDC. For permission requests contact the GMS information line at 508-988-7610 or gms@idc.com. Translation and/or localization of this document requires an additional license from IDC.

For more information on IDC visit www.idc.com. For more information on IDC Custom Solutions visit www.idc.com/prodserv/custom_solutions.

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Methodology

This is the seventh time IDC has conducted the Digital Universe study for EMC. It was—and still is—the only study to estimate and forecast the amount of digital data created annually. It has used the same methodology since its inception, allowing the size of the Digital Universe to be traced all the way back to 2005, when “only” 132 exabytes of data were created and replicated.

Our basic approach of sizing the Digital Universe is to:

Develop a forecast for the installed base of any of 40 or so classes of device or application that could capture or create digital information.
Estimate how many units of information—files, images, songs, minutes of video, calls per capita, packets of information—were created in a year.
Convert the units of information to megabytes using assumptions about resolutions, compression, and usage.
Estimate the number of times a unit of information might be replicated, either to share or store. Much of this information is part of IDC’s ongoing research.

Available Storage

IDC routinely tracks the terabytes of disk storage shipped each year by region, media, and application.

To determine available storage on hard drives, IDC storage analysts estimated storage utilization on capacity shipped in previous years and added that to the current-year shipments.

For optical and nonvolatile flash memory, we developed installed capacity ratios per device and algorithms to calculate capacity utilization and overwriting. In optical, we found there was much more prerecorded storage than storage that was overwritten by users.