Trends to Watch in 2022 Enterprise- Storage Trends

Another year has dropped off the calendar, and the pandemic has accelerated change in digital infrastructure. Massive companies have started to shift their tens of thousands of employees into work-from-home and hybrid models. The unceasing growth of data and this new dynamic has put a lot of stress on how data is served and stored. As we move on to a new year, new data storage trends will continue to emerge and have started to come into focus.

Flash Forward

Market research from Mordor Intelligence projected that the enterprise flash storage industry would continue to grow in 2022 and the upcoming years. There has been a noticeable growth in the flash market in India and China, as the countries continue to modernize their internet infrastructure as well as their cloud storage capabilities. Although the growth has been fast in the countries of India and China, the largest share is still in the United States. The increase in enterprise mission-critical, cloud-based software with frequent read/write operations has been the driving force of this growth in the United States.

Multi-clouds

In the year 2021, investments in cloud-computing infrastructure have increased by 32%. According to a report from industry analyst firm Gartner, it has reached $59 billion of investments. That number is anticipated to reach the $100 billion mark in the current year. Before, the industry was once dominated by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Now, enterprises are starting to diversify their cloud storage contracts across several vendors, resulting in a multi-cloud storage solution that makes full use of cherry-picked offerings from different contracts.

The Wall Street Journal reported that companies like Experian are seeking multi-cloud solutions from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle simultaneously. Additionally, the CIA and the Pentagon have also followed the same path. Microsoft and Oracle have paired up, allowing their users to seamlessly implement a multi-cloud solution utilizing both the Azure and Oracle Cloud at the same time.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Companies that have implemented Artificial Intelligence in their operations have seen great success. Back in 2016, Google utilized its DeepMind AI to use, resulting in a 40% reduction in the energy expended on data center cooling.

Later, Google's AI was used to develop weather forecasting models, which projected the thermal effects of outside temperatures as well as changes in wind and solar power asset outputs.

Network as a Service (NaaS)

The pandemic has accelerated change in how enterprises connect with their data storage. In Cisco's 2022 Global Networking Report, Cisco projects a near-term growth in the adoption of the Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) market. Under a NaaS model, businesses, small to large companies alike, lease networking hardware such as routers and switches, providing rapid scalability and on-demand pricing.

We can't deny the fact that the world has changed ever since the pandemic hit the world. Understandably, more and more companies try to implement work-from-home and hybrid models to not lose their edge. The flash storage industry, as well as different cloud storage, artificial intelligence, and network as a service, will continue to grow in the upcoming years.

These are only a handful of trends moving in the data storage realm to look out for. There are also other developments worth looking into, such as edge computing, improvement in hardware-level security, data center sustainability, and the further growth of computational storage.