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There was good news Jan. 22 from 451 Research—although not all that surprising—for the cloud storage industry: Public cloud storage spending will double by next year.
This is not a trivial market by any stretch. The global cloud storage business sector has been projected by another researcher, MarketsandMarkets, to grow from $18.87 billion in 2015 to $65.41 billion by 2020, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28.2 percent during the forecast period.
451 Research, in its report released Jan. 22, is predicting that the $19 billion spent in 2015 will double in size by next year. That falls right in line with the MarketsandMarkets perspective.
According to the results of 451 Research’s new Voice of the Enterprise survey, organizations will continue to upgrade their storage environments in 2016, with most expecting to increase their storage spending over the next year. Not surprisingly, the research reveals that the proportion of spending on public cloud storage services will come largely at the expense of traditional, on-premises storage.
“The storage infrastructure may have proven itself hardy to change over the years, but it is not immune to the same uber-trends that are fundamentally disrupting the role of IT at organizations of all sizes,” said Simon Robinson, research vice president at 451 and research director of the new Voice of the Enterprise: Storage service.
“IT managers are recognizing the need for storage transformation to meet the realities of the new digital economy, especially in terms of improved efficiency and agility in the face of relentless data growth,” he said. “It’s clear from our Q4 study that emerging options, especially public cloud storage and all-flash array technologies, will be increasingly important components in this transformation.”
The inaugural Voice of the Enterprise: Storage study focuses on end-user trends in enterprise storage. Based on research conducted with more than 700 IT professionals worldwide, the quarterly study combines 451 Research’s analysis with responses from a panel of more than 25,000 senior IT buyers and enterprise technology executives.
Key Data Points From the Study
- Storage spending will be healthy in 2016, with more than 70 percent of respondents expecting to increase their storage spending over the next 12 months, compared with 2015. However, storage spending growth in Europe and among very large organizations (over 10,000 employees) will be weaker than average, as will spending in the government and utilities verticals.
- On average, spending on public cloud storage will account for 17 percent of total enterprise storage spending by 2017, up from 8 percent today. In some verticals—such as retail—the public cloud will account for 25 percent of total storage spending by 2017. Spending on on-premises storage will fall from 70 percent in 2015 to 58 percent in 2017.
- While the traditional storage players, led by EMC, dominate the list of strategic players today, this looks to change over the next two years. Both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft will become top five overall storage vendors by 2017.
- From a storage products perspective, spending will increase the most on public cloud and all-flash arrays, while spending on traditional storage area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) products will be more muted. The largest spending declines will be on tape products.
- Dealing with data and storage capacity growth is by far the single greatest pain point for storage managers. Respondents cited improved backup and disaster recovery as the top storage objective for 2016.
451 Research is presenting a free Webinar on this topic at 8 a.m. Pacific/11 a.m. Eastern on Jan. 28. You can register here.