'Digital data generated by India in 2012 equals Mount Everest'

Digital data generated by India last year, which if stored in Apple's iPhone 5 with 32 GB space, will equal over 5,100 stacks of the device, as tall as Mount Everest, a study by EMC-IDC said Wednesday.

"India's digital information in 2012 would equal to more than 5,100 stacks of iPhone 5 devices that are as tall as the sub continent's famed Mt Everest," an EMC-sponsored IDC digital universe study said.

The world's tallest peak, Mount Everest stands at 8,848 meters.

India's share of digital information is expected to grow 23-fold between 2012-2020, driven by continued growth of Internet usage, social networks, and smart phones among consumers, falling cost of technology, digitisation among others, the study said.

"The digital bits captured or created each year in India are expected to grow from 127 EB (exabytes) to 2.9 ZB (zettabyte) between 2012 and 2020," it added.

One EB has 18 zeroes after 1 and ZB has 21 zeroes. However, less than half a per cent of all digital information is analysed today while 36 percent would provide valuable insights, it said.

"India's digital transformation is happening at a rapid pace exposing gaps in technology investments that exist in enterprises today. Less than half a percent of digital information is analysed today; business and government need to recognise this and invest in understanding and tapping it," ,

EMC India and SAARC President Rajesh Janey said.

The study said that India's digital universe is growing much faster than available storage. "While in 2012 only 1 exabyte of storage capacity was available for every 3.4exabytes of data, by 2020, data is expected to grow almost thrice to 9.4 exabyte for every exabyte of available storage," it said.

It also highlighted that India spent USD 0.87 per GB to manage data, which is much lower than China, US and Western Europe.

The study said cloud adoption is growing fast and by 2020, 42 percent of all digital information will be "touched" by the cloud.

"As companies are increasingly under pressure to better manage their business and align closer to their customers' needs, companies are increasingly turning to highly leveraged storage cloud to enable them to run complex business analytics that can be accessed by a broad range of client devices," IDC India Research Director Venu Reddu said.