Getting our heads round ‘quintillions’ of data

How much data is sloshing around the world at any one minute?

Billions? You would probably say that was an under-estimate. We’ve been getting used to seeing ‘trillions’ recently, especially in relation to the economies of the larger nations — but still not enough for data.

Quadrillion? Try quintillion.

For those preferring it in figures that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 — and it’s the estimate from a recent international meeting of Finance Ministers and officials in Morocco.

Moreover, the production of data generated every day is increasing exponentially to sextillion, septillion and beyond which, the experts say, holds massive potential value for public Finance and Economics Departments worldwide.

President of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council of Morocco, Ahmed Reda Chami said these ever-increasing amounts of data can provide Governments with better insights into population dynamics, economic trends and stakeholders’ voices.

“Decisions could be made based on evidence rather than intuition or conjecture. Government officials could use data to decide how to invest in different programs or regions,” Mr Chami said.

“To harvest this potential, Governments must first build the necessary infrastructure and develop their ‘data architecture’ by agreeing common data standards so that information can be moved and compared between Departments and countries.”

Former head of the United Kingdom’s Government Digital Service, Kevin Cunnington agreed, but said introducing a universal system of digital identification was important.

“Governments have a huge amount of legacy data, but most of it is incorrect. Creating an authorised digital ID system ensures there’s a core of trustworthy information, providing a solid foundation for work to link up datasets and public services,” Mr Cunnington said.

He said Governments could take various routes to this capability.

“Trailblazers such as Estonia and Singapore have built their own digital IDs around existing universal national ID systems. We’re now seeing an emerging trend where countries which don’t have national identity systems are creating them,” Mr Cunnington said.

He pointed to the example of India which had photographed and fingerprinted all 1.3 billion of its citizens and created ID cards.

“We’re seeing that replicated by countries like Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh and Romania. It’s a real trend,” Mr Cunnington said.

“The next step in digital ID is to make them interoperable, allowing tourists, students and expats to use their national IDs while abroad.”