This article introduces the seven major storage development trends in 2024, covering aspects such as network security, hybrid cloud storage, green IT, customer experience and containerized applications, and explains how to free up financial and operational resources and invest in artificial intelligence (AI). ) and other IT projects, and how to plug the IT skills gap.
Trend 1: The three elements of cyber resilience, detection and recovery together form an overall enterprise cyber security strategy
The integration of network resilience, detection and recovery on a single storage platform will promote the evolution of enterprise storage to a higher level of network security in 2024. Backups alone are no longer enough to ensure the security of storage systems. Primary storage has become a prime target for cybercriminals, with the most insidious and difficult-to-detect ransomware and malware attacks wreaking havoc on businesses.
The key to hardening your storage infrastructure is a combination of resiliency (the ability to implement defensive security measures to protect against attacks), detection (the ability to know when data is corrupted and known good copies of the data have not been compromised by ransomware or malware), and the ability to protect against attacks. Recovery after a cyberattack (resilience).
This trend toward improving the security of storage systems is important as cyberattacks against enterprises continue to increase rapidly.
Trend 2: Freeing up storage funds for AI and other critical IT projects
Dramatically reducing enterprise storage costs can free up IT budgets to fund other important new projects, such as artificial intelligence projects, cybersecurity-related projects or other strategic initiatives. This trend in 2024 will play a key role in such enterprises: pressure to accelerate AI projects to prepare for the next phase of digital transformation and improve cybersecurity to deal with more sophisticated AI-based cyberattacks.
With IT budgets forecast to grow by 8% through 2024, Gartner predicts that the funding for these new projects will need to come from elsewhere.
A smart way to move IT spending in-house is to reduce storage costs while improving storage. At first glance, this sounds like a paradox, but the trend in 2024 will be to leverage the following three factors to make this paradox a reality: 1. Storage consolidation into a single, scalable high-availability high-performance On the platform, 2. autonomous automation, 3. flexible pay-as-you-go consumption model for storage implemented using a hybrid cloud (private and public cloud) model.
Trend 3: Green storage is on the rise
Having more storage capacity and using fewer storage arrays in the same footprint is part of an ongoing trend to make enterprise storage and data centers greener. Fewer arrays means a smaller carbon footprint, less coolant used, less recycling, which means a much smaller environmental impact.
Additionally, consolidating multiple arrays into one storage platform means using less energy, in line with strategies to increase sustainability. Given the rise in energy costs this year, the storage upgrade also offers the benefit of being energy efficient, which means cost savings. Consolidation also means significantly improved site utilization.
As energy costs increase, companies need to reduce floor space costs, reduce carbon emissions, and reduce the environmental impact of storage array recycling. In the new year, companies will strengthen audits of storage infrastructure and make greater efforts to eliminate storage Inefficiency and waste in the environment.
Green storage will be ascendant in 2024.
Trend 4: Seamless hybrid cloud integration
The enterprise shift to hybrid cloud has been ongoing for years, as enterprises find that a balanced approach that leverages public cloud while maximizing on-premises private cloud data infrastructure makes the most business sense. But what's new about this trend is the dominance of hybrid cloud in enterprise storage.
The new capabilities make it extremely easy for enterprises to manage on-premises private cloud storage and public cloud storage as an integrated, software-defined infrastructure, as if the public cloud was just another "array" identified in the software user interface. The progress made over the past year in ensuring that managing hybrid cloud storage becomes simpler has prompted organizations to adopt hybrid cloud as a storage approach across the board, especially for larger enterprises.
Hybrid cloud also becomes easier to scale. If a large enterprise needs to quickly expand capacity due to a sudden surge in data traffic, it can quickly scale on a single software-defined petabyte-scale local storage system. It gets a cloud-like experience but leverages its own infrastructure without any downtime or complexity.
The fundamental reason why hybrid cloud is so powerful and attractive is low cost and control. Enterprises can reduce costs by using local storage systems after consolidating storage from many arrays into one or two systems. At the same time, enterprises can gain greater control over their data and ensure compliance by keeping it on-premises, especially in light of recent regulations around data governance and data privacy.
Trend 5: Unleashing the potential of containers in hybrid cloud data centers
Analysts at Gartner estimate that by 2026, about 90% of organizations worldwide will be running containerized applications in production environments, up from just 40% two years ago. By 2026, it is estimated that up to 20% of enterprise applications will run in containers, more than double the number in 2020. Containers are undoubtedly gaining adoption and becoming more widely used.
This multi-year trend will gain momentum in 2024 as businesses need to innovate faster than ever to meet changing customer expectations. The point is that in order to compete better, businesses have become more digitally focused.
Containers embody a cloud-native approach that provides a cost-effective way to automate deployment of modern applications (and automate deployment at scale) while making them portable, environment-agnostic, and less resource-dependent, resulting in cost savings. As a result, new applications are being developed at an astonishing rate. IDC claims that by the end of 2023, approximately 500 million new "logic applications" will be created, a number equivalent to the applications developed in the past 40 years combined.
According to the latest survey from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), 44% of respondents are already using containers in almost all applications and business units, and another 35% of respondents said that containers are used in at least several production-level applications. app.
There is more focus on container-enabled infrastructure, especially enterprise storage infrastructure. In the world of containers, storage is critical. The challenge with this trend is choosing the right enterprise storage, especially for enterprises that need to scale container environments to petabyte scale.
Trend 6: Skills gap in storage requires increased automated storage
A data center skills gap, especially in enterprise storage, has emerged and is getting bigger. Fewer IT professionals are choosing to pursue a career in storage, but enterprise capacity is growing exponentially.
While storage administrators are now more valuable, more and more enterprises are having trouble staffing the traditional legacy storage that supports applications, workloads, and the entire data infrastructure. The lack of qualified IT professionals creates a precarious future for many businesses. Therefore, the trend in the enterprise space is to turn to autonomous automation of enterprise storage equipped with artificial intelligence.
As autonomous automation becomes mainstream in the enterprise, CIOs and IT leaders can take a "set it and forget it" approach to storage. This reduces the risk of skills gaps jeopardizing their ability to have an always-on, reliable storage infrastructure.
This approach requires a very simple user interface so that the average IT professional can manage storage, whether to add capacity, gain insight into the performance of the storage system, or quickly recover after a cyberattack. At the same time, the use of autonomous automated storage frees up valuable IT human resources for use in other aspects of the data center and enterprise software environment.
Trend 7: Redefining the enterprise storage user experience
For enterprise storage, user experience is no longer just about the GUI. While the GUI is still important and should be as easy to use as possible, the scope of user experience has broadened to include today's essential elements: service level agreements (SLAs), white glove services, and professional services. Enterprises are not just looking for a hardware box to run their applications and workloads, they are increasingly looking for excellent service and support to be integrated into the storage solution.
The current trend is for enterprises to choose storage vendors that offer the best support, the best SLAs, and the best proactive professional services, but at a lower cost or no charge. It redefines expectations for user experience. Enterprises want to know that their storage provider has someone who can bring expertise to troubleshoot their customers' problems. They want to know that L3 support is available out of the box. They want reassurance from the integrated capabilities of a professional services team.
Businesses see all of this as added value, and user experience has become a make-or-break factor for many businesses that are re-evaluating their choice of storage solution providers based on this criterion. User experience has become the overall experience in the eyes of the customer.