Data crisis looms as Oracle warns of overload Mark Hurd said that "Data is growing exponentially - in some cases by 35 to 40 per cent a year. This is causing big problems for our customers and tremendous economic pressure. He warned that growth in data demands from smartphones, laptops and sensors meant that by 2016 there would be three times as many devices connected to the internet as there are people on the planet and that there would be an 18-fold increase in mobile data traffic. Mr Hurd told a newspaper that 50 billion devices will be connected to the internet by 2020, driving a twentyfold increase in the amount of information being sent back to servers. Pressure on businesses and security are likely to increase rapidly. Oracle has recently added 3,000 sales staff to its 60,000 employees in a bid to push its own cloud-computing products. Mr Hurd told The Times it was "laughable" to suggest that those products had fallen behind their competition, and claimed that its new full-service "Fusion" product would soon be used by thousands of customers. The growth in so-called "cloud computing," where data is stored and processed online, has provided opportunities for companies such as Oracle, as well as Amazon, Cisco, Intel and others, but it has meant many businesses and consumers have faced new challenges resulting from huge volumes of new data but an inability to adequately process it. Hurd, who joined Oracle after five years at HP, is not the first to warn that businesses risk "drowning in data." Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, has said cloud computing will cause "horrible problems." Wozniak told an audience in Washington DC: "I really worry about everything going into the cloud. I think it's going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years. The 61-year-old Wozniak said: "With the cloud, you don't own anything. You already signed it away. He added: "I want to feel that I own things. A lot of people feel, 'Oh, everything is really on my computer,' but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it.