In the last two years, 90% of all existing data in the world has been created (B. Marr, “How much data do we create every day? The Mind-Blowing Stats Everyone Should Read,” 2018). As of 2023, each person, including construction industry professionals, generates about 1.7 megabytes of data per second (“How much data is produced every day?,” 2024), and the total amount of data in the world will reach 64 zettabytes in 2023 and is projected to exceed 180 zettabytes, or 180*10^15 megabytes, by 2025 (Т. Sullivan, “AI and the global “datasphere”: how much information will humanity have by 2025?” 2024).
This information explosion has a historical precedent – the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the fifteenth century. Just fifty years after its introduction, the number of books in Europe doubled: in a few decades, as many books were printed as had been created by hand over the previous 1,200 years (Statista, “Total number of printed books produced in various regions of Western Europe in each half century between 1454 and 1800,” [Internet]). Today, we are seeing even more rapid growth: the amount of data in the world doubles every three years.
Given the current rate of data growth, the construction industry has the potential to generate as much information in the next few decades as it has accumulated in its entire previous history
In today’s world of construction business, even small companies generate a huge amount of multiformat information on a daily basis and the digital footprint of even a small construction company can reach tens of gigabytes per day – from models and drawings to photographic records and sensors on site. If we assume that each technician generates on average about 1.7 MB of data per second, this is equivalent to about 146 GB per day, or 53 TB per year (Fig. 1.3-3).
When a team of 10 people work actively for only 3 hours daily, the cumulative amount of information generated per day reaches 180 gigabytes (Fig. 1.3-4).
Assuming that 30% of work data is new (the rest is overwritten or deleted), a 10-person firm can create on the order of several hundred gigabytes of new data per month (actual numbers depend on the type of business company does).
Thus, it becomes obvious: we are not just generating more and more data – we are facing a growing need for its efficient management, storage and long-term availability. And while previously data could “lie” on local servers at no cost, in the context of digital transformation, more and more companies are starting to use cloud solutions as the basis of their information infrastructure.
