40 Whew! What a year! And like the past several before it, 2023 has been one for the record books. On the tech side, you’d be easily forgiven for thinking that the only trend that mattered was generative AI and ChatGPT. After all, this new and rapidly emerging technology has dominated headlines and inspired a plethora of think pieces as leaders around the globe try to make sense of it all. Meanwhile, ransomware attacks continue to surge and, in response, we’re seeing more regulation taking aim at cybersecurity as government agencies try to get a handle on it. At Scality, this year’s focus has been delivering storage solutions our partners and customers can count on to keep their data protected, no matter what. We don’t do hype, but we’ve put together some thoughts on where we see technology and storage heading in 2024. First, let’s take a look at how last year’s predictions shook out. A quick recap of our 2023 predictions: How’d we do? First, let’s jump in the Wayback Machine and revisit our predictions for 2023. When it comes to IT buying criteria, security rules all — including for data storage. This one definitely checks out. Security increasingly takes priority when it comes to purchasing decision-making. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2028, 100% of storage products will include cyber storage capabilities focused on active defense beyond recovery from cyber events. Malicious software supply chain attacks will slow open-source adoption. Software supply chain attacks doubled this past year as open source became a more popular initial access point for bad actors. In fact, one cybersecurity vendor reported there was a known security risk in 1 in every 8 open-source component downloads in the past year. Unstructured storage will get more intelligent. Countless new search APIs and services have been added to cloud storage services in the past year, and this trend is certainly going to continue. One example: AWS S3 Select offers a limited form of SQL search within an S3 bucket, while AWS Athena offers a more comprehensive capability across S3 data. Green storage innovation will gain steam. While still a work in progress, sustainability is quickly becoming top of mind for business leaders today. In the U.S., this is largely driven by the need to comply with scope 1 and scope 2 emissions requirements. Data centers account for approximately 2% of total energy use in the U.S., making them one of the most energy-intensive building types. HPE has also added a sustainability meter within the GreenLake platform. Managed cloud services and object storage will grow more tightly integrated. One key example is the continued advancement of HPE GreenLake, and we’re also seeing more vendors get in the mix with object storage as a service. (Learn more about how managed services company Somerville is integrating Scality’s object storage with its cloud services here.) Gazing ahead: Data storage industry predictions for 2024 Now, let’s put on our future-vision glasses and see what trends await us in the new year. Rumors of HDD’s demise are greatly exaggerated. Many flash vendors are prognosticating the end of spinning disk (HDD) media in the coming years. While flash media and solid-state drives (SSDs) are making major strides in density and lower cost (dollar per GB) on top of their well-known latency advantages, we see HDDs holding a 3-5x density/cost advantage over high-density SSDs through 2028. Therefore, the current call for HDD end-of-life is akin to the end-of-tape arguments from 20 years ago — and we similarly expect HDDs to live on for the foreseeable future as they provide workload-specific value. AI’s value — and potential — for unstructured data will come to the forefront. Large language models (LLMs) are the current shining stars and hold incredible potential and promise for business use, leveraging mainly structured (text-based) training data. We predict that in 2024, businesses will discover that the value of their vast troves of unstructured data, in the form of images and other media, will become a useful source of insights through AI/ML tooling for image recognition applications in healthcare, surveillance, transportation and other business domains. Businesses will store petabytes of unstructured data in scalable “lakehouses” that can feed this unstructured data to AI-optimized services in the core, edge and public cloud as needed to gain insights faster. Ransomware detection will be the next advancement in data protection solutions. Ransomware isn’t letting up. That’s for certain. Bad actors are a wily bunch, and they will continue to try every tool in their toolbox to get access to organizations’ sensitive data. As a result, security and ransomware protection will become more proactive and a standardized part of application/storage deployments. In other words, storage providers and applications will offer either native features or integrations with third-party products that scan data in flight and/or at rest for malicious intent. Managed services will become key to unlocking the complexity of hybrid cloud. Multi-cloud is a reality today for most enterprises in their use of multiple SaaS and IaaS offerings from different vendors. However, the use of on-premises and public cloud in a single application or workload has become mired in the complexities of different application deployment models and multiple vendor APIs and orchestration frameworks. While this has inhibited the powerful agility and cost-reduction promises of the hybrid-cloud model, we predict that businesses will increasingly leverage the experience and skills of managed services providers (MSPs) to solve these complexity issues and help them achieve business value and return-on-investment. Second star to the right and straight on to 2024! As always, the new year will bring a combination of known and unknown variables. While it’s true that an unknown can cause unforeseeable disruption — a la ChatGPT this year — we’re focusing on the foreseeable market trajectory. Based on our years of experience in the storage industry, these predictions represent the logical and likely outcomes of where the market is heading. Whatever may come, Scality is ready to serve our customers with the scalable, flexible, immutable storage they need.
