Digital Footprint Calculator
It has been a few years since mankind started to realize how scarce and precious natural resources were, and what impact our activities, however insignificant, could have on the environment. This is especially true of document activities, with recent examples such as estimates of the “Paper Universe” or Xerox’s Carbon Footprint Calculator made available to estimate your print fleet’s impact on the environment.
But mankind is now starting to realize that even digital, “virtual” information has a cost and impact, as we see first attempts to evaluate its footprint. IDC and EMC are at the forefront of these activities, with the Digital Footprint Calculator.
For those of you that are familiar with my blog, you might remember my first post on the topic and the humongous estimate of the Digital Universe; This report and estimate has been revised, and is actually higher than expected - 281 exabytes in 2007, due to grow to 1800 exabytes.
In fact, less than half of that activity is created by human activities (documents, pictures, phone calls, …). The rest constitutes a “digital shadow”, surveillance photos, logs, journals, backups, etc…
The report is available online at this URL, and more interesting resources such as videos and a copy of the Digital Footprint Calculator can be found here.
Scary, huh ?
