Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer at Infinidat.

We kicked off 2022 with a strong list of the much-anticipated trends in the storage market. It has now been six months since we released our annual trends update for the year, and we want to pause for a moment at this mid-year point and assess how our predictions have fared so far. Have our predictions been on track? Have there been new trends to emerge? Were any of our projected trends significantly off or in need of adjustments?

Market trends are dynamic, not static. The following is our mid-year assessment. You’ll be happy to know that the new information that augments our annual trends update is sure to make the second half of 2022 just as exciting in the storage space.

PREDICTION ASSESSMENT: Exceeding Expectations

Trend #1: Critical nature of data and cyber resilience in the face of increasing cyberattacks

We predicted at the start of 2022 that cyber resilience from the storage estate would be critical this year because of the threats of cyberattacks. The 2022 KPMG Fraud Outlook report “A Triple Threat Across the Americas” affirmed the increasing challenges; 77% of respondents to the KPMG survey say their cyber risk will grow over the next year. Out of the respondents from companies with at least $10 billion in revenue, 85% say they experienced fraud losses in the last year, driven by cyber breaches.

Check Point Research reported recently that it found 50% more cyberattack attempts per week on corporate networks globally in 2021 compared with 2020. Cybercrime cost U.S. businesses more than US$6.9-billion in 2021, and only 43% of businesses feel financially prepared to face a cyber-attack in 2022. Furthermore, supply chain vulnerability has become a bigger issue in 2022. Indeed, 82% of CIOs believe their software supply chains are vulnerable. Software supply chain attacks have hit three out of five companies in the past year. The shift to DevOps and cloud native development have made security more complex. This is a multi-faceted trend to keep front and centre. Enterprise storage cyber resilience continues to need to be part of your corporate cybersecurity strategy.

PREDICTION ASSESSMENT: On Track

Trend #2: Incorporating intelligent automation throughout the entire storage system and modern data protection infrastructure

We have not been surprised to see the adoption of automation in the enterprise market, but what has made our prediction more relevant is the increasing demand for not only automation but specifically for autonomous automation. The evidence that enterprises want the “autonomous” component to be built into storage platforms underscores what we forecasted for 2022.

Enterprises want to automate their platforms for the variety of benefits they can obtain, including easier management, more efficient use of IT resources, lower CAPEX and OPEX, sustainability, and self-learning capabilities for continuous improvement.

PREDICTION ASSESSMENT: Adjustment Needed

Trend #3: Integration of storage technologies based on hybrid cloud and container tech

We need to make an adjustment to this trend to put a finer point on the fact that storage-as-a-service (STaaS) is emerging in 2022 in a new light. The flexibility that enterprises and service providers can have with STaaS is only increasing. IT leaders are turning to STaaS for a multitude of reasons, one of which is to take costs and convert them to a cloud-like consumption model, lowering CAPEX and OPEX.

PREDICTION ASSESSMENT: Adjustment Needed

Trend #4: Leveraging storage technology to ensure application and workload performance and availability

We predicted at the beginning of 2022 that there would be an enhanced focus on application latency on read and write of sub-100 microseconds. We need to adjust this prediction because a new benchmark for latency was set in April 2022: sub-40 microsecond latency. This is ground-breaking and has caused a recasting of this trend. While there is a variety of storage performance metrics to consider, latency is the number one determinant for real-world transactional application and workload performance.

PREDICTION ASSESSMENT: Revised Trend

Trend #5: The power of storage consolidation

We have gathered information over the past six months to warrant our introducing a trend for the second half of the year that we had not included on our list in January: enterprise storage consolidation. Part of the reason that consolidation makes it on our mid-year trends list is not only because enterprises can significantly reduce their costs, but also because storage consolidation has emerged as a first pass for enterprises to turn their IT environment into AIOps-based datacentres. Storage consolidation essentially paves the way, giving enterprises the opportunity to evolve their platform strategy and reduce the physical assets in their storage estates.

Consolidation also simplifies the work of storage administrators, cybersecurity managers, and other IT personnel.