The future of DNA and data storage

Tremendous technological advances have brought us into a digital age
that generates data at an exponential rate.
As the demand for data storage grows, Twist Bioscience is working on a solution that provides a sustainable way
to store enterprise data by storing it on DNA.

To examine how enterprise data (data generated by organizations such as corporations and government departments) is expected to grow and the expected challenges of storing more data than ever before, Twist and Fujifilm sponsored Furthur Market Research to publish a white paper
.

Potential inadequacy areas

Until now, existing data storage methods have been able to keep up with the amount of data generated by individual organizations, but as the data generated continues to increase, we are approaching what is known as a "potential shortfall zone," where the predicted supply of storage does not meet storage demand
.

According to the white paper, more than 25% of annual storage demand growth will outstrip the storage options
currently available.
In 2019, 2020 and 2021, enterprise new data transferred to storage devices grew by 35%, 33.
6%, and 48.
3%,
respectively.
If enterprise storage needs grow at a rate of 35% per year, the potential underfall area will reach 7.
9 million petabytes by 2030 (1 petabyte is equivalent to 1 million gigabytes).

If it grows at a rate of 45%, the potential under-area could exceed 25 million petabytes
.

Undeleted cold data growth

Many organizations store their data
indefinitely.
This cold or archived data is rarely accessed, such as 'just in case' (JIC) or 'write once never read' (WORN) data
.
About 75% of enterprise data stored today is cold and may never be deleted or accessed
.

Shift to sustainable solutions

Today, most corporate data is stored on hard drives, which consumes a lot of energy
.
With the world facing pressing sustainability challenges and more and more enterprise data making it impossible to delete, new storage solutions need to reduce energy consumption by orders of magnitude
today.

DNA data storage promises to be a sustainable solution to fill potential gaps
.
If the data is stored on DNA, then all the data in the world can be stored
with minimal energy.

Data stored on DNA minimizes the need for maintenance, migration and energy, making it the most sustainable long-term storage option
.

Scan the code to read the full white paper