The amount of data stored, the capacity of the servers in which it's kept, and the ways that it can be accessed and stockpiled have amplified exponentially in the past decade, meaning increasingly more changes for the way both businesses and consumers maintain the storage of their information.

Back in 2001, Apple's first version of the iPod could hold roughly 5 gigabytes of music or about 1,000 songs. Today, their latest MP3 players can hold up to 160 GB or around 40,000 songs. Consumers can easily find hard drives that have storage capacities in the range of 2 terabytes (2,078 GB) at common retailers. Individuals are buying into data storage more and more frequently as different forms of information are increasingly becoming digitalized.

But, what's appealed to consumers has also appealed to the corporate world on a much larger scale. Data storage has become the backbone for many businesses already, but that's only the beginning.

The International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that the volume of the world's digital information will grow to an astonishing 35 trillion GB by 2020. In 2010 alone, the amount of digital information created and replicated grew by 62 percent to more than 838 billion GB, which the IDC said would fill enough DVDs to make a stack that reaches from the earth to the moon and back.

Businesses that have questions about increasing or improving their own data storage should talk to FileMaker consultants that specialize in developing and organizing custom database software. From there, they can reap the benefits of an accurate, modern information storage system that can even be accessed from mobile devices like iPads and iPhones.