Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016.  Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni

Cloud - The Big Get Bigger, The Rest Innovate

Cloud has been a transformative technology trend, which is plain for anyone to see, but it has been particularly effective in launching new storage technologies and dismantling old ones. In 2016, we will not only see the continued fall of "big storage" as they grasp for relevance against the commodity cloud providers, but we'll also see the new storage titans go head to head.

Here are three predictions for what we'll see in 2016:

• EMC-Dell will need to formulate an enterprise cloud storage strategy soon after the merger is final: The company has no choice. As it stands today, the combined entity will dominate the data center as it is traditionally architected. But the data center is rapidly moving to the cloud, and neither Dell nor EMC have a storage solution that integrates natively with the cloud. To compete, they'll have to acquire or build, and quickly.
• Azure Blob Storage will continue to take enterprise market share from Amazon S3: Microsoft has been focused on making their cloud very friendly to the enterprise by layering applications on top of it and integrating it with their own solutions. Amazon, on the other hand, has become a favorite of test / dev. This trend will continue, and Azure's efforts will continue to pay off in the enterprise.
• The enterprise will continue to use strong encryption: Pressure from governments' criminal justice and national security organizations will continue to mount for the inclusion of a "back door" in encrypted communications, but it won't succeed. Strong encryption already exists, and the toothpaste can't be put back in the tube. Enterprises have digital assets that need protection from competitors and criminal organizations; strong encryption is the best means to protect that data, and they're not going to stop using it.
  

The explosion we've seen in file data growth is only going to escalate, both next year and beyond. This problem has created amazing innovation in cloud and storage technologies, which is why we have seen, and will continue to see, such rapid and exciting change.

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About the Author

Andres Rodriguez is CEO of Nasuni, a provider of storage services to the global enterprise. He previously co-founded Archivas, a company that developed an enterprise-class cloud storage system and was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems in 2006. After the acquisition, he served as Hitachi's CTO of Files Services. Prior to founding Archivas, Rodriguez was CTO of The New York Times. He received a Bachelor of Science in engineering and a Master's in physics from Boston University. He holds several patents for system designs.