Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2024. Read them in this 16th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
The Call to Decrease IT Complexity Will Redefine Budgets, Priorities and Players
By Paul Speciale, Chief Marketing Officer, Scality
Customers and thought leaders agree: with skyrocketing adoption of generative AI and continued cyberattacks that infect organizations, the need to decrease IT complexity with secure, efficient solutions will dominate IT budgets into the new year. The perennial data storage management challenges in 2024 are much the same as in 2023 – growing data volumes, tight budgets, skills shortages, complicated IT installations, but with yet again an increasing frequency of cyber threats.
Yet new options that save time, hassle and unlock operational efficiency did indeed emerge in 2023 – in ways that sometimes defied prevailing opinion. In 2024 enterprises will find four new, often under-explored paths to gaining a competitive advantage.
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. Depending on requirements the use of SSDs are certainly warranted for latency-sensitive, read-mostly workloads.
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. Further analysis can be found in this 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 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.
Integrated 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.
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.
Today we may think that 2023 was one for the record books, with generative AI and ChatGPT posing new opportunities and challenges. Throughout 2024, we’ll see organizations continue to try to find the right balance between deploying these emerging technologies to support specific use cases while adhering to governance and regulatory requirements. Yet the drive to make enterprise IT become more scalable, secure and sustainable is inexorable, and vital to the bottom line. The seemingly small innovations before us in data management – things like smarter APIs and cyber-resilient feature sets – are themselves an open door to sizable gains in efficiency. We predict that this time next year, we will maintain the same sense of amazement at where we’ve been in 2024, and marvel at where we’re headed.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Speciale, chief marketing officer at Scality, leads the firm’s global marketing organization across both product and corporate marketing. Paul’s experience spans 20+ years of industry experience in both Fortune 500 companies, such as IBM and Oracle. as well as several successful startups.
