Evolution of Data.
In today’s date and time data is more important than anything else. It is actually correct to say now that data is more expensive than anything else that we know.
Previously we had data which was stored on huge manuscripts and were written by hand. Then came the era of digital computers and data was started being stored on floppy disks and then hard disks right now. If we see closely then we could observe that the size of data held by floppy disks were in megabytes and in todays date we get Gigabytes of data in a single pendrive. The graph showing the evolution of data is constantly increasing. Companies like Facebook, Google, Reddit, et cetera, all deal with big data, i.e. Huge amount of data of billions of people using those platforms and storing their files, documents, pictures, posts, audio files & video. These data comes at a cost.
Storage used by these large companies!
Facebook generates 4 petabytes of data everyday i.e. millions of gigabytes everyday. So how does it deals with these data? Thats for another Medium post. Right now let’s get to know what we are dealing with now.
A million gigabyte of data is not something that we could play with. It contains data of all sorts and needs to be encrypted at the highest level as this sort of data also attracts the minds of cyber security professionals who have changed their way from protecting data to accessing data in unfair means.
So, this is something that is way more important than a piece of metal which is used as an ornament.
There are people trying to find vulnerabilities in this database, in order to access the personal information of millions of people and if accessed then its upon the company to pay the ransom amount or find a way around this hack else all the personal data is going to be leaked online which in turn could enrage millions of people or could also be the downfall of that particular company.
Today due to the increased attacks targeted to these company, that people are trying different solutions to store data in their own house thereby reducing the risk of having their data leaked somewhere online.
Data Size Chart
- Kilobyte(kb) : 1024 Bytes
- Megabyte(MB) : 1,048,576 Bytes
- Gigabyte(GB) : 1,073,741,824 Bytes
- Terabyte(TB) : 1,099,511,627,776 Bytes
- Petabyte(PB) : 1,125,899,906,842,624 Bytes
- Exabyte(EB) : 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 Bytes
- Zettabyte(ZB): 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 Bytes
- Yottabyte(YB) : 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 Bytes
This size chart starts from 1 kilobyte to 1 yottabyte. If a data centre tries to hold yottabytes of data then it should be the size of a whole city.
NSA Data Center.
Thanks to the long regretted contract employee (Edward Snowden) and a
great report in FORBES we get to know about what National Intelligence Agency is upto in its UTAH Data center. It is targeting each and every type of digital communication media such as cellular communication, online communication and all other things and storing their data into its server in the name of national protection. It is aiming to store data larger than the size of Exabytes. To be clear that an exabyte contains trillions of terabyte and to clear this perspective further lets say that you will require 400 terabytes of space to store each and ever book ever written by humans till today. The whole unit costs billions of dollars.
People are dying out of hunger and poverty and the governments are building up facilities out of billions of dollars just in the name of national security.
No nation wants to stand back when there is a question raised on its national security right? What about poverty?
No one will ever be digitally safe
