TECH CHRONICLES Daily deluge of digital data expected to get even worse

-- The amount of data that could fill 57.5 billion 32GB iPads.

The study, sponsored by information research company EMC Corp., is the latest to quantify the tsunami of data that wash over our lives. Last year, the two companies estimated 2010 would generate 1.2 zettabytes of digital information.

The driving forces behind the growth of the digital universe: research and money. Smart phones, tablets and a range of devices truly are helping people create, manage and store data. Should the contingency arise, since 2005, annual enterprise investments in the cloud, hardware, software, services and staff to create, manage, store and generate revenue from information have increased 50 percent to $4 trillion.

-- Though cloud computing accounts for less than 2 percent of IT spending now, nearly 20 percent of the information will be "touched" by the cloud by 2015 - that means somewhere in a byte's journey from originator to disposal.