Storage Spending On The Rise

Many organizations plan to spend more on storage this year, especially public cloud storage, according to a survey by 451 Research.

The research firm polled 700 IT pros worldwide and found that 70% expect their storage budget to increase over the next 12 months compared to 2015. Over a third of respondents expect their storage budgets to remain flat. While smaller companies will spend more on storage, large organizations with more than 10,000 employees will spend less, according to the 451's Voice of the Enterprise survey.

The survey indicated a clear shift in storage spending towards public cloud, Simon Robinson, research VP at 451 Research, in a webcast. Spending on public cloud storage will double, making up 17% of total enterprise storage spending by 2017 compared to 8% today. The increase is across the board, regardless of company size or industry vertical, but smaller companies and retail organizations plan to increase their spending the most, he said.

"Public cloud is becoming not only mainstream in storage, but strategic," he said, adding that the increasing maturity of the technology making companies more comfortable in adopting it.

At the same time, spending on on-premises storage equipment will fall to 58% in 2017, down from 70% last year.

The shift towards public cloud storage will alter the hierarchy of storage vendors that enterprise view as strategic suppliers, with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft moving into the top five suppliers by 2017, according to the 451 Research study. In fact, AWS is projected to take the No. 2 spot behind EMC in two years.

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The study also indicated solid growth for all-flash arrays, but a mixed outlook for more traditional technologies like SAN and NAS products. Tape products will see the biggest decline, the poll showed.

One driver for the growth in public cloud storage is organizations' focus on improving their backup and disaster recovery capabilities, Robinson said. In fact, improving backup and disaster recovery was the top storage objective in the study, cited by 25% of survey respondents. "There are still big, unresolved issues when it comes to backup and disaster recovery," he said. "This is one reason we expect a substantial uptick in public cloud adoption for storage."

For storage administrators, the top issue keeping them awake at night is dealing with data and storage capacity growth, according to the survey. "Data growth is still the No. 1 issue," Robinson said.

He identified three key trends in storage: the rise of flash/solid-state storage; software-defined storage, including hyperconvergence; and cloud-based models. "These are presenting the staid, old world of storage with different challenges and opportunities," Robinson said.

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Learn more about the changing storage landscape in the Storage Track at Interop Las Vegas this spring. Don't miss out! Register now for Interop, May 2-6, and receive $200 off.