By the end of 2011, online users will have created 1.8 zettabytes (or 1.8 trillion gigabytes) of data, the equivalent of every U.S. citizen writing three tweets per minute for 26,976 years, according to an IDC Digital Universe study.

And these hard-to-grasp figures just keep rocketing upward, IDC said. Over the next decade, the number of servers managing the world’s data stores will grow ten times and the amount of data creation will multiply 50 times. Cloud computing, which currently accounts for 2 percent of most IT budgets, will increase dramatically; the IDC expects that 20 percent of all information will reside in the cloud in some way by 2015.

Surprisingly, a big portion of the data created will be from products such as clothing sensors, medical devices, and structures like buildings and bridges.

This rapid growth will generate a particular need for data security experts, the IDC stated, but the number of IT professionals will grow by only 150 percent over the same time period.