In Scality’s recent annual predictions for 2024 in data storage, several trends emerged as focal points for the upcoming year. The surge in generative AI usage and the persistent threat of cyberattacks will continue to shape IT priorities, emphasizing the necessity for secure, efficient, and simplified solutions.
Amidst ongoing challenges in data storage management — including burgeoning data volumes, budget constraints, skill shortages, complex IT setups, and escalating cyber threats — Scality underscores the perpetual importance of addressing these issues.
Giorgio Regni, CTO at Scality, highlighted the company’s engagement in compelling industry discussions throughout the year. These discussions centered on several key topics: the potential obsolescence of hard disk drives (HDD), the role of on-premises data storage in advancing data management and AI, and the critical measures required to safeguard data against ransomware attacks. The predictions for 2024 stem from the comprehensive exploration of these pertinent themes within the data storage industry, reflecting the evolving landscape and the trajectory of ongoing dialogues among customers and industry thought leaders.
HDDs Will Endure Despite Flash Dominance Predictions
Several voices within the industry have been forecasting the inevitable demise of traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) in favor of the rapidly advancing solid-state drives (SSDs) and flash media. While SSDs exhibit commendable attributes such as reduced latency, improving density, and declining cost per gigabyte, HDDs maintain a significant 3-5x edge in density-to-cost ratio compared to high-density SSDs, a trend expected to persist until at least 2028.
Proclamations heralding the death of HDDs echo the “tape-is-dead” arguments from two decades ago, a narrative that proved premature in hindsight. Just as tapes endured and found niches in specialized applications, HDDs are likely to persist due to their ability to cater to specific workloads. Dive deeper into this debate with our featured series:
- All-flash storage all the time? Why it doesn’t make sense for petabyte-scale data
- High-density HDD vs. QLC flash: Demystifying the power efficiency debate
- End users will discover the value of unstructured data for AI
 The Potential of Unstructured Data
The burgeoning growth of large language models (LLMs) has been a defining narrative in recent times, leveraging structured textual data for immense organizational benefits. However, the upcoming year will witness a paradigm shift as businesses recognize the untapped potential lying within their unstructured data repositories, encompassing images and diverse media formats.
As stated in scalable ‘lakehouses, this unstructured data is poised to become a wellspring of insights through AI and ML applications, particularly in domains like healthcare, surveillance, transportation, and various industries. Organizations are set to harness petabytes of this unstructured data, deploying AI-optimized services across the core, edge, and public cloud infrastructure, expediting the extraction of invaluable insights.
AI-Driven Ransomware Detection
Recent years have seen remarkable strides in fortifying data against cyber threats, notably the growing menace of ransomware. The evolution of immutability in data protection solutions, especially in backup data, has been pivotal in safeguarding critical information. However, the upcoming frontier in this domain lies in AI-fueled ransomware detection capabilities integrated within data protection and storage solutions, slated for advancements and prominence in 2024.
Multi-cloud environments have become commonplace in enterprise operations, involving diverse SaaS and IaaS solutions from various vendors. Yet, integrating on-premises and public cloud components within a single application or workload has faced challenges due to varying application deployment models and multiple vendor APIs and orchestration frameworks.
This complexity has impeded the potential benefits of the hybrid-cloud model, hindering its promised agility and cost efficiencies. Looking ahead, organizations are poised to turn to managed service providers (MSPs) to navigate these complexities effectively. In the upcoming year, the expertise and support offered by MSPs will play a pivotal role in addressing these challenges, enabling businesses to attain substantial business value and achieve better returns on investment (ROI).
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