Enterprise Storage Trends That CIOs Need to Grasp for the Remainder of 2022

Being on the forefront of enterprise storage in the Fortune 500 market, Infinidat has broad visibility across the market trends that are driving changes CIOs cannot ignore. To help make it quick and easy for IT leaders to get a reliable snapshot of the enterprise storage trends, we put together this “trends update” for the second half of 2022.

In less than five minutes, you can take hold of useful and relevant information that will help you make more insights-driven decisions over the next six months. The following five trends can be summed up in eight words: cyber resilience, automation, hybrid cloud, performance, availability, and consolidation. 

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 $6.9 billion in 2021, and only 43% of businesses feel financially prepared to face a cyberattack 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 center.

Enterprise storage cyber resilience continues to need to be part of your corporate cybersecurity strategy.

Trend #2: Incorporating intelligent automation throughout the entire storage platform 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 autonomously automate their platforms for the variety of benefits they will obtain, including easier management, substantially more efficient use of IT resources, lower CAPEX and OPEX, sustainability, and self-learning capabilities for continuous improvement. 

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

Storage-as-a-service (STaaS) is emerging in 2022 in a new light. The flexibility that enterprises and service providers 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 and freeing up IT resources to work on other projects.

Integral to meeting customer demand amid this trend, Infinidat was named by DCIG, a leading IT and storage analyst firm, one of 2022’s top 5 Enterprise STaaS solution providers in the world.

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 of sub-100 microseconds. While there is a variety of storage performance metrics to consider, latency is the most critical determinant of your real-world transactional application and workload performance. We need to adjust this prediction because a new benchmark for latency was set in April 2022: sub-35 microsecond latency.

This is groundbreaking and has caused a recasting of this trend, as the new InfiniBox™ SSA II delivers lower latency than any other comparable enterprise storage platform in the industry at an unprecedented 35 microseconds of latency. This enhancement allows customers to not only have optimal application and workload performance, but also allows for substantial storage consolidation which reduces data center CAPEX and OPEX.

The impact of lower latency in the enterprise storage infrastructure is dramatically transforming storage performance, increasing efficiency, and reducing total cost of ownership (TCO).

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 update is not only because enterprises can significantly reduce their costs (which they have been with Infinidat for several years), but also because storage consolidation has emerged as a first pass for enterprises to turn their IT environment into AIOps-based data centers.

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. Having 50 storage arrays translates into more complexity than five InfiniBox® systems. You’re able to take a set-it-an-forget-it approach, and then focus more on how to leverage AIOps for your benefit.

At the same time, consolidation of storage arrays delivers savings, including power, cooling, rack space, security, floor space, and operational manpower. It fits perfectly into environmentally friendly “green IT” strategies to meet organizational sustainability goals, which are increasingly part of over-arching enterprise digital transformations.

To download a PDF of these market trends for your quick and easy reference, click here.