Over a year ago on this blog I posted information about the rate at which new data was being produced each year. It involved the plethoric number of iPods it would take to hold the year’s data – a number which would have filled a similarly excessive number of football stadiums with said iPods. The point is that this is the language we have begun to use when discussing the ever-increasing amount of data generated by humans and machines each year.

Well here’s a new one: according to Google chairman Eric Schmidt, quoted in a recent CGT Magazine article, the company now creates 5 exabytes of data every three days. To trump the iPod-football stadium illustrations of yesteryear, 5 exabytes is the amount of information created from the beginning of time through 1978. This figure is obviously no less ridiculous. But the title of the article which offered this stat, “Are Consumers Drowning in Data?” is as telling as it is commonplace in 2011. The answer was and still continues to be: yes.

As data continues to increase in its rate of production, the technology to capture and utilize that data has too evolve as well, just like our superlative articulations of just how big the data is becoming. In the analytical sphere, keeping your data profitable means constantly adapting your solution to the behemoth. And these kinds of timely adaptations must be prime considerations in your chosen data management solution. Next year there will be an even more over the top analogy to describe 2012’s data proliferation. Will your organization be ready to not bat an eye when that analogy hits headlines?