The World Wide Wibble is now made up of 486 billion gigabytes worth of data, according to bean counters IDC.

According to the Guardian newspaper if that data were bound into books it would create a stack that would stretch from the Earth to Pluto ten times. The stack of books is apparently growing faster than Nasa's fastest space rocket. Part of the reason is that large files from digital cameras and the world's army of surveillance cameras are sucking up bandwidth. Another reason is the increase in machine to machine communications in Internet transactions.

IDC thinks that the digital universe is expected to double in size over the next 18 months thanks to a  rise in the number of mobile phones. Last year the world's total digital content was 161bn gigabytes. Despite the business use of the world wide wibble, more than 70 per cent of the information in the digital universe is created by individuals and includes phone calls, emails, photos, online banking transactions or postings on social networking sites, including Twitter.

The job of protecting the vast majority of this content lies with corporations and organisations with more than 30 per cent of data requiring heavy security. IDC/EMC estimate that the cost of the computers, networks and storage facilities that drive the digital universe is about $6 Trillion.