Our data is doubling every year

This story from MIT's Technology Review says that the amount of data we are storing is doubling every year. Doubling every year. So that $120 terabyte hard drive you bought to back up the baby pictures and your music library? You'll need another one in a year or two. Then four. Then eight. Hard drive densities keep going up, but they are not doubling every year.

The answer is more cloud storage, and the cloud, to be efficient, is going to have to move closer to the data. It is extremely expensive to drag data across the public Internet to get to a large data storage facility like Apple's, Microsoft's, or Amazon's, compared to a short trip across a locally-owned modern fiber infrastructure straight to a local data center. Akamai has made a business about putting data closer to users, but Akamai caters to the one way data direction (down) of major content providers like CNN. The next frontier is affordable two-way data storage, and communities that have affordable fiber coupled with local well-designed data and colo centers will find it easier to attract and keep businesses and jobs.