7 Enterprise Storage Trends for 2018

Enterprises today are generating and storing more data than ever, and the trend shows no sign of slowing down. The rise of big data, the internet of things, and analytics are all contributing to the exponential data growth. The surge is driving organizations to expand their infrastructure, particularly data storage.

In fact, the rapid growth of data and data storage technology is the biggest factor driving change in IT infrastructure, according to the Interop ITX and InformationWeek 2018 State of Infrastructure study. Fifty-five percent of survey respondents choose it as one of the top three factors, far exceeding the need to integrate with cloud services.

Organizations have been dealing with rapid data growth for a while, but are reaching a tipping point, Scott Sinclair, senior analyst at ESG, said in an interview.

"If you go from 20 terabytes to 100 terabytes, that's phenomenal growth but from a management standpoint, it's still within the same operating process," he said. "But if you go from a petabyte to 10 or 20 petabytes, now you start taking about a fundamentally different scale for infrastructure."

Moreover, companies today see the power of data and understand that they need to harness it in order to become competitive, Sinclair said.

"Data has always been valuable, but often it was used for a specific application or workload. Retaining data for longer periods was more about disaster recovery, having an archive, or for regulatory compliance," he said. "As we move more into the digital economy, companies want to leverage data, whether it's to provide more products and services, become more efficient, or better engage with their customers."

To support their digital strategy, companies are planning to invest in more storage hardware in their data centers, store more data in the cloud, and investigate emerging technologies such as software-defined storage, according to the 2018 State of Infrastructure study. Altogether, they're planning to spend more on storage hardware than other infrastructure.

Read on for more details from the research and to find out about enterprise storage plans for 2018. Click on the row of buttons below or on the arrows on either side of the images. For the full survey results, download the complete report.

(Image: Peshkova/Shutterstock)