The future of storage and processing

In 2013, we teamed up with Stephen Fry to explore the history of computing, starting with the abacus and leading to the global cloud infrastructures of today. The rate of growth in technology is exponential, and we thought it was a good time to look to the future and see where storage and processing trends are heading.

The future of storage

In the space of just over a century we have gone from the birth of electrical utility through amazing engineering innovation to find ourselves in a truly connected world. In 2005, 130 Exabytes of information was created. In 2012, this rose to more than 1.8 Zettabytes, and amazingly this figure is more than doubling every 2 years. So much data is being created that scientists are creating new ways to store it.

Hard drives, helium drives, DNA storage and holographic storage have all evolved in recent years to open up the realm of possibilities for data storage. Today, with these new experimental methods of data storage, to store all of the world's data would need only a DNA storage device roughly the size of a small family hatchback.

Explore the future of storage with Stephen Fry here.

The future of processing

After decades of exponential growth, processing speeds are stagnating: we're simply running out of atoms to shrink. Something fundamental needs to change in order for us to progress.

Whilst many of the newer techniques won't be seen in commercially available computers for a while yet, we're making great advances with the likes of graphene hardware, phosphorene hardware and quantum computing.

See what the future of processing holds here.

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