American business magazine Forbes says we’re creating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily at the current pace and that the figure is set to grow exponentially by 2020. It also says that 90% of the world’s data was created in the past two years.

You may wonder who’s responsible for all this data, but every time you send a message or type a search into Google or send an email you’re adding to these world data statistics.

Forbes goes on to say that worldwide there are about 5 billion searches per day, with 77% on Google and the rest on smaller search engines. Google processes 40 000 searches every second, which adds up to 3.5 billion searches per day! Try and imagine the staggering quantity of data generation going on – more than has ever been produced by mankind to date.

Computer software giant DOMO gathered some staggering facts in 2017, and reported that every minute of the day:
• 46,740 photos were posted by Instagram users
• 120+ professionals joined LinkedIn
• 456,000 tweets were sent on Twitter

The thing is that all this data needs protection. Think about business critical data, customer information, manufacturing schedules, product information, financial data – it’s endless and it all needs to be safe, not only for commercial reasons but legal too. Legislation has made businesses the custodians of personal information, and it’s therefore their responsibility to protect it so that it’s used only for the purpose it’s intended.

Small business data generation

The global information picture is massive, but have you worked out how much data your business is generating every day? Emails from all your staff members, your financial data, your supplier and customer information, reports, blogs and social media posts. It’s probably a lot more than you realise. And most of it needs to be protected, not only because it’s business critical data but because if you lose it you’ll suffer all the consequences of a breach such as loss of faith and a tarnished brand, not to mention a hefty fine if you can’t show substantial efforts towards data privacy compliance.

The concern is the sheer volume of data that most businesses need to backup. With cloud backup it doesn’t matter how fast your data grows because you’re able to get more storage as you need it. You only pay for the gigabytes you use and you can up- or down-scale as necessary on a month-to-month basis.

If you backup your vital business data with a reputable cloud backup provider you’ll know that no matter how much your data grows every day, it’ll be safe and recoverable at any time, in an offsite location.