If you think you have your data storage issues under control, think again. In the next five years, there will be an enormous growth of new data that agencies need to deal with, according to Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, who spoke at the Open Government and Innovations Conference in Washington, DC this week.

"This notion of thinking about data in a structured, relational database is dead," Kundra said. "Some of the most valuable information is going to live in video, blogs and audio, and it is going to be unstructured inherently."

The warning is well ahead of just what is coming, but with everything the federal government is planning in the electronic world, it's not too soon to start preparing for it. Everything from electronic health records to Web 2.0 technologies will come flooding into the digital warehouses, needing a place to be catalogued and stored.

So, will the federal government run out of space if it doesn't do a better job of planning for all this data? It's too soon to tell, but it may be in the interests of your agency to plan ahead.

For more on the data explosion:
- check out this Federal Computer Week article