Scality’s 2024 Predictions: AI, Hybrid Cloud and Ransomware Detection Will Define the Data Storage Landscape, While Hard Disk Drives Live On

Scality, a global leader in reliable, secure, and sustainable data storage software, shared its annual data storage predictions for 2024. With the use of generative AI skyrocketing and cyberattacks continuing to infect organizations, ongoing demands to decrease IT complexity with secure, efficient solutions will dominate IT budgets into the new year. In addition, perennial data storage management challenges — growing data volumes, tight budgets, skills shortages, complicated IT installations, and increasing cyber threats — will persist.

While these are standard assumptions, this year, Scality focused its predictions on the ongoing conversations led by customers and thought leaders in the data storage industry.

Giorgio Regni, CTO at Scality, said, “We’ve had some interesting industry debates with thought leaders this past year, including the potential death of the hard disk drive (HDD), the role on-premises data storage can play to help advance data management and AI, and, finally, what it really takes to protect data from ransomware. This year’s predictions play off all of these themes.”

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HDDs will live on, despite predictions of a premature death
Some all-flash vendors prognosticate the end of spinning disk (HDD) media in the coming years. While flash media and solid state drives (SSDs) have clear benefits when it comes to latency, are making major strides in density, and the cost per GB is declining, we see HDDs holding a 3-5x density/cost advantage over high-density SSDs through 2028.

Therefore, the current call for HDD end-of-life is akin to the tape-is-dead arguments from 20 years ago. In a similar way, HDDs will likely survive for the foreseeable future as they continue to provide workload-specific value.  

End users will discover the value of unstructured data for AI
The meteoric rise of large language models (LLMs) over the past year highlights the incredible potential they hold for organizations of all sizes and industries. They primarily leverage structured, or text-based, training data. In the coming year, businesses will discover the value of their vast troves of unstructured data, in the form of images and other media.

This unstructured data will become a useful source of insights through AI/ML tooling for image recognition applications in healthcare, surveillance, transportation, and other business domains. Organizations will store petabytes of unstructured data in scalable “lakehouses” that can feed this unstructured data to AI-optimized services in the core, edge and public cloud as needed to gain insights faster.

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Ransomware detection will be the next advancement in data protection solutions
In recent years, the tech industry has made tremendous strides in protecting data against all manner of threats, including increasingly destructive malware and ransomware. This is exemplified by the rise of immutability in data protection and data storage solutions, especially for backup data.

While data protection and restoration are a major cornerstone that serves as a critical last line of defense in a layered cybersecurity infrastructure, new advancements in AI-generated ransomware detection capabilities will emerge in data protection and storage solutions in 2024.

Managed services will become key to resolving the complexity of hybrid cloud
Multi-cloud is a reality today for most enterprises, in their use of multiple SaaS and IaaS offerings from different vendors. However, the use of on-premises and public cloud in a single application or workload has become mired in the complexities of different application deployment models and multiple vendor APIs and orchestration frameworks.

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While this has inhibited the powerful agility and cost-reduction promises of the hybrid-cloud model, throughout the coming year, organizations will increasingly leverage the experience and skills of managed service providers (MSPs) to solve these complexity issues and help them achieve business value and ROI.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]