Whilst researching for yesterday’s installment of the Insider Threat series, that I am writing over on our online training site CyberAwake, I read an article by Bret Arsenault, from Microsoft that opened with this quote:
The amount of data captured, copied, and consumed is expected to grow to more than 180 zettabytes through 2025.
Bret Arsenault, Corporate Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer, Microsoft
Now a zettabyte sounds to me like a very big number and a lot of data. I had to look up what a zettabyte was in something I could (nearly) understand – one zettabyte is equivalent to a billion terabytes (Zettabyte Definition, 2022). I can pick up a terabyte drive and put it in my pocket but may be not a billion of them or 180 billion of them.
So I went looking for another description of what a zettabyte was:
If each Terabyte in a Zettabyte were a kilometer, it would be equivalent to 1,300 round trips to the moon and back (768,800 kilometers).
Shruti Jain, Cisco (Barnett Jr., 2016)
That is still something to try and get you head around!
The Zettabyte Era
Which bought me to a new piece of knowledge. We are now in the Zettabyte Era – and have been since September 9, 2016. This was the day when according to Cisco’s estimate, “the world’s collective Internet use will reach the Zettabyte threshold for this calendar year”. (Barnett Jr., 2016)
Which finally brings me to Randall Munroe
On his “what if?” web site there is speculation and calculation as to how many punch cards (follow the link if you do not know what a computer data punch card is) would be required to store Google’s information? Spoiler it is a lot!
Google’s Datacenters on Punch Cards (xkcd.com)
There you go, you now know how easily I can be distracted when writing!
Clive Catton MSc (Cyber Security) – by-line and other articles
p.s. I did eventually get back to the blog post and finished writing it! Go and have a read, I think it will interest you, if you have every thought about a member of your team taking your data with them when they go to a new job..
Further Reading
Back again, because that insider threat has not gone away… – CyberAwake
References
Zettabyte Definition. Techterms.com. (2022). Retrieved 13 October 2022, from https://techterms.com/definition/zettabyte.
Barnett Jr., T. (2016). The Zettabyte Era Officially Begins (How Much is That?). Cisco Blogs. Retrieved 13 October 2022, from https://blogs.cisco.com/sp/the-zettabyte-era-officially-begins-how-much-is-that.
