The emergence of IoT (internet of things) along with significant growth of structured and unstructured data has created high demand for innovative IT storage services. IT storage services comprise of delivering and managing large amounts of stored data, including provisions for backup, recovery, and archiving. As the volume of structured and unstructured data is increasing globally, many large organizations are focusing aggressively on acquiring and managing storage devices. This trend is made incredibly clear through an analysis of the global IT storage services market. In 2015, the market stood at just over $67 billion, and, according to analysts at Technavio, is poised to grow at a CAGR of 7% by 2020.
Storage services can be broadly divided into online storage, backup and archiving, disaster recovery, dedicated servers and hosting and colocation. Geographically speaking, the Americas hold the largest share of the global IT storage services market, followed by EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), and APAC (Asia Pacific).
What’s trending in the IT storage services market?
The use of erasure coding is quickly catching on in the IT storage services market. The need for high-capacity hard disk drivers, coupled with a demand for cloud-based storage systems, can account for this growing trend. Erasure coding is essentially a mechanism used for protecting data in cloud-based services. It enables faster rebuilds for drives and protects data across different nodes, rather than just a single storage system.
Duplication of data is a problem that many organizations are working to overcome. IT storage services have now incorporated a copy data management feature for streamlining multiple processes that use different tools from different vendors. One of the pioneers in this sphere is Actifo. It has created a platform that enables the decoupling of data from infrastructure and consolidation of data protection processes.
IT storage providers are gradually transitioning to the hybrid cloud. This is because, in spite of the use of cloud technology, many organizations are facing issues in data transfer between private and public clouds and data centers. The hybrid cloud storage model, on the other hand, allows companies to transfer data between data centers and different types of clouds under governance. This way, organizations do not have to deal with vendor lock-ins and can still achieve scalability and cost-efficiency. Along with the hybrid cloud, there has also been the introduction of hybrid flash-array, which blends performance and capacity in an effective manner.
With the lack of skilled professionals, along with increased complexities in data protection and capacity allocation, there is a good chance that these trends might take some time to come into effect and reach a wider audience. That being said, as the demand from organizations across the globe calls for the improvement of storage services, there has been a great deal invested into training professionals and improving research capabilities.
Where is the IT storage services market headed in the next few years? Find out:
