Survey Results: Cloud Storage Takes Off, Flash Cools Off

An IT industry analyst article published by Enterprise Storage Forum.

By Mike Matchett,

The Enterprise Storage Survey results show that the biggest storage budget line item is cloud storage, although HDDs still hold more data. We explore why cloud is inevitably winning, and when the actual tipping point might come about.

Is on-premise storage dead? Is all storage inevitably moving to the cloud? If you work in IT these days, you are no doubt keeping a close eye on the massive changes afoot in storage infrastructure these days. Flash acceleration, hyperconvergence, cloud transformation – where is it all going and how soon will it get there?

We explored the past, present and future of enterprise storage technologies as part of our recent Storage Trends 2018 survey.

The Dominance of Cloud Storage
The short story is that cloud storage has now edged out the ubiquitous hard drive as the top budget line item in IT storage spending (see below). We are not sure if this is good news or bad news for IT, but it is clear that those cloud-heavy IT shops have to get on top of and actively manage their cloud storage spending.

Despite having cloud move into the lead for slightly more than 21% of companies, the game is not over yet for on-premise storage solutions. Flash has still not run it’s full course and HDDs are still the top budget item today for almost as many companies (21%) as cloud.

New innovations in solid-state like NVMe are providing even greater acceleration to data center workloads even as SDD prices continue to drop. As silicon price drops, total spending inherently skews towards more expensive technologies – the footprint will grow even if the relative spend doesn’t keep pace…(read the complete as-published article there)