According to an estimate by International Data Corporation, the digital world will collectively encompass a mind-boggling 2.7 zettabytes (a A zettabyte equates 1 billion terabytes) of data at some point of time in 2012, a number roughly equating not less than 700 billion DVDs. And this is where the opportunity lies for some fast-rising resources keen to cash upon the need for classified data capsules.

Here are some more facts on the data invasion:

• The total space of the world’s computer hard drives estimated at roughly 160 exabytes in 2006 has fast increased, as Seagate reported selling not less than 330 exabytes worth of hard drives during  fiscal year 2011.
• The entire Internet as of 2009 was estimated to comprise about 500 exabytes or half a zettabyte, a figure bound to grow by leaps and bounds in the coming years. As of this March, no storage system has managed to achieve one zettabyte of data.
• According to another projection by CenturyLink, the Web world will witness a four-fold rise in data being created/ replicated by 2015. It is expected to reach 7.9 zettabytes. The major contributor to it is video, expected to be almost half of the consumer Internet traffic by the 2012 end, the bulk of that traffic originating from wireless devices.

The dramatic development is bound to create further need for these vast databases to co-relate and seamlessly interact for users to make any sense out of them.  One among other players operating in the new niche industry is Microsoft. The company says its Windows Azure Marketplace includes ‘trillions of data points’ apart from a language translator. Users can also sell data sets to Azure.

An online market buying & selling finished Software as a Service (SaaS) apps and exclusive datasets, it helps connect consumer-driven corporate entities seeking innovative cloud based solutions that are ready-to-use. They can a huge variety of data comprising demographic, financial and retail as well as web services and accurate algorithms for data cleansing, to be used in their MO software, BI tools and custom applications.

Business intelligence through data analysis

Corporate clients can explore apps and data by accessing real time premium data sets in order to drive BI. Their key feature is flexible, consistent and context optimized-APIs. On their part, developers can build apps easily on any platform via open APIs, and reach customers and leads through the Windows Azure Marketplace. For example, KERN4CLOUD (K4C), a cloud content managing service, is a comprehensive corporate data processing tool for that guarantees business easy accessibility and integrity of information stored across multiple formats.

On the other hand, Archiver offers data from over 200 microblogs on basis of keyword and location. The Social Archive serves as a high availability index of vast social media data from more than 200 sources particularly useful for deep data analysis, search engine keyword optimization, plus dynamic updating of sticky content. The Social Archive data with that from Microsoft ‘DataMarket’ projects is aimed to make archived data more relevant. Data sources with oft-updated content are indexed more regularly (popular micro blogs like Twitter and news websites). Dataset is easily searchable on basis of keyword and location.