Thinking beyond your corporate network, how much online online storage is required to hold all of the data associated with your digital life?

According to US academic Professor Vladimir Shalaev of Purdue University, that figure has grown astronomically in recent decades.

In a presentation this week at the the International Conference for Quantum Technologies  in Moscow .Professor Shalaev estimated that in 1986, the average person had just 500 megabytes to his or her name.

By 2007, this number ballooned to 44.5 gigabytes, an 8,800% increase over 21 years.

This might seem an outlandish figure but when you add up all the email in the cloud, online photo libraries and Youtube home videos the  figure does not seem so high.

Professor Shalaev presented addressed what he describes as the "evolution of an information society," which is necessitating a staggering amount of storage when you multiply that 44.5GB by more than 2.8 billion Internet users worldwide (Source: International Telecommunications Union)

More than 150 of the world’s top physicists are attending the International Conference for Quantum Technologies this week..

According the conference web site "Quantum Physics will have an enormous influence on humanity’s future development. The world is on the threshold of a quantum revolution, in which the fundamental discoveries of physics will be actively used to create materials with entirely novel, unprecedented characteristics as well as ultrafast quantum computers.

"Quantum technologies promise fundamental changes in many aspects of society, from Information Technology and Energy to Medicine and Transportation. Discoveries in these fields will have the same influence on civilization, as, for instance, the invention of computers in the middle of the last century."