Classroom Companion: Business

20.1.4 
 Storage
The amount of stored data has increased by about 30% per year. This corresponds 
to a doubling time of about 2 years and 4 months. The amount of data stored 
surpassed one zettabyte in 2012 and is estimated to reach almost 20 zettabytes in 
2020.
During the last 10 years, the amount of data generated, stored, and distributed 
has surpassed one zettabyte (10
21
bytes), and computer science has entered a new 
historic period, the Zettabyte Era.
The Zettabyte Era has laid the basis for the big data technology—the systematic 
analysis of huge data sets, usually too large and unstructured to be handled by 
traditional methods. This may be viewed as a possible, though vague, definition of 
big data technology. Big data economics may, in a similar vein, be defined as fol-
lows.
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
Zettabyte
Year
. Fig. 20.2 Annually generated data. (Authors’ own figure)
20.1 · Zettabyte Era

---

310
20
Definition 20.1 Big Data Economics
Big data economics is the study of how big data can be turned into economic value, 
where the key value proposition is systematic processing of digital data to detect hid-
den information that can be used for business purposes.
Big data usually refers to advanced data analysis methods to determine user 
behavior, to uncover patterns in large data sets, and to extract particular infor-
mation from unstructured data. The term does not refer to the size of the data 
set itself since even large data sets may contain information that can be extracted 
by simple methods (e.g., identities and addresses of persons stored in national 
registers). On the other hand, the data set must be large in order to contain 
information that is hidden by structural complexity and, therefore, requires big 
data analysis techniques to be uncovered. 
7
Box 
20.1
 lists some of  these tech-
nologies.
0
20 000
40 000
60 000
80 000
100 000
120 000
140 000
160 000
180 000
200 000
2000
2004
2008
2012
2016
2020
Petabyte/month
Year
. Fig. 20.3 Capacity of the Internet. (Authors’ own figure)