Big data storage predictions: five trends to watch out for in 2023
- Details
- Published: Tuesday, 20 December 2022 08:46
Paul Speciale, Scality CMO, gives his predictions for developments in the data storage industry over the coming year.
2022 has been marked by innumerable ransomware attacks and extreme unstructured data growth, further complicating the efforts of IT teams to run efficient enterprise computing resources. In the present economic climate of higher costs and geopolitical uncertainty, what does 2023 have in store for the data storage industry? Here are five trends to watch out for in the coming year:
Security will top IT buying criteria
Storage projects have been impacted by supply chain concerns and economic difficulties over the past couple of years, and this will not change in 2023. The exception will be projects that can deliver a substantial return on investment for ransomware prevention. It goes without saying that the threat of ransomware will continue to be a major concern for IT leaders throughout 2022. And Gartner estimates that 60 percent of all enterprises will require storage products to have integrated ransomware defence mechanisms by 2025, up from 10 percent in 2022.
Storage solutions can address gaps in multi-level security, business recoverability, and data immutability for ransomware prevention. And over the next few years, these capabilities will dictate customers’ purchasing decisions. What’s more, new technologies that leverage AI-based anomaly detection to identify ransomware attacks will gain in popularity.
Green storage innovation will accelerate
An extended economic downturn in addition to growing climate change awareness will see businesses prioritise their IT spending on products that reduce power consumption, and thereby save money and deliver a positive return on investment in operational costs.
2023 will see vendor offerings with innovations that leverage smart resource utilisation and the latest low-power and high-density media to decrease power consumption. The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Green Storage Initiative aims to establish standards to reduce power consumption from large-scale data storage systems. This will result in measurable reductions in power and cooling, lessening the environmental impact of the storage industry.
Managed cloud services will integrate with object storage
In 2023, we will see application vendors develop and publish their own extended storage APIs that will deliver improved reporting, performance acceleration, data placement, and monitoring. Object storage solutions will integrate with these APIs to offer more attractive solutions and return on investment for enterprise and mid-market customers with use cases including backup and ransomware protection, big data analytics, and AI/ML.
What’s more, 2023 will see object storage vendors partner with large OEMs or managed service providers (MSPs) to deliver fully integrated, private-cloud S3 storage-as-a-service solutions. This will be driven by demand from customers for cloud-like storage services that can be deployed within their own datacentres.
Open-source adoption will be hindered by malicious software supply chain attacks
Ransomware and malware attacks are not only increasing in frequency, but also sophistication. 2022 saw the global average cost of a data breach reach approximately $4.35 million, not forgetting the extensive IT resources required.
Recent high-profile breaches have highlighted the vulnerability of many commercial software solutions. In the coming year, we will see open-source development and supply chains become a more common threat vector, since they have a broader attack surface. As a result, enterprises will need to carefully assess and vet these technologies before deploying them at scale.
Unstructured search will become smarter
IDC estimates that by 2025, unstructured data will make up 80 percent of all data. With trillions of unstructured data objects accumulated in object storage solutions, organisations need intelligent data search methods to analyse and mine their data effectively, and more quickly reach meaningful and actionable conclusions and insights.
Progress has already been made in this area throughout the past year, but in 2023 mature search and query capabilities for unstructured data storage solutions will emerge. Vendors will integrate these capabilities with standard access methods, while maintaining enterprise-class security and auditing. This will not only simplify application development but also enable object storage resources to serve as a single solution for unstructured data storage and query.
