By Matthew Johns, Global Product and Solutions Marketing Manager, SUSE

Storage Will Remain a Top Priority with Continued Growth of Data

Organizations around the globe have become reliant on storage to protect and preserve all kinds of information their business has collected. Data has become an integral part of the way businesses function today, and the reliance on storage is only expected to increase. According to a 2018 study by DOMO, there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day. With this exponential growth, there will undoubtedly be changes seen in the industry.

Below are three predictions to keep an eye on for storage in 2020 and beyond:

Machine Learning Will Take the Storage Industry to New Heights

The storage landscape is changing rapidly, particularly in the open source space, with innovative technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) machine learning (ML) and deep learning changing business operations. These technologies also have an impact on how data is stored. In particular, ML technologies are making storage solutions more dynamic and predictive by enabling a more intelligent and autonomous environment. In 2020, we will see more open source teams harvesting basic, telemetry data to train machine learning capabilities over time. Additionally, as more data becomes available, we will see storage teams setting up environments where machine learning is being utilized to manage larger data sets and drive business outcomes. 

Storage Admins Must Expand Their Skillset

Every transformational change in technology brings about change in a storage administrators' roles and responsibilities. In order to meet dynamic enterprise needs, companies must prioritize upskilling their storage admins in 2020 to prepare them for the influx of next-gen technology and new compliance/IT challenges.  For storage admins using software-defined technologies, an extra emphasis should be put on automation and programming skills. Additional skills that should be a priority include:

• Understanding and managing hybrid storage configurations with on-prem hyper-converged systems and cloud storage services in the public cloud
• Backup and recovery from and to the cloud
• The ability to monitor storage in the cloud and watch usage to control budgets
• Networking skills become more and more critical as various storage moves to different form factors like HCI, public cloud and others (this may not be a new skill but could be for some admins)

The scale of storage continues to grow and there continue to be new opportunities for growth in the industry. Storage administrators must think of ways to maximize their future value by gaining expertise and developing skills across a variety of technologies.

Disaster Recovery Will Be the Ultimate Brand Management Tool 

2020 holds a lot of promise for storage professionals, but it also holds an entirely new threat landscape.

Ransomware, data breaches, malware and outages are just as common as they have ever been. A breach or cyberattack has the capability of destroying businesses and company reputations, which is why storage providers have made disaster recovery a major focus in recent years. At the end of the day, a company's reputation will be determined by how they either prevented the attack and/or data loss, or how they responded to the incident. The key ingredients of successful disaster recovery plans will include a focus on vulnerability detection, DR team development and effective communication. There will also be an increased focus on multi-cloud strategies as way to ensure both on-prem and offsite protect.

As we know, the storage market is vastly expanding. In fact, a Markets and Markets report expects the data storage industry to be valued at more than $144 billion by the year 2022. This is the reason why storage should and will continue to be prioritized by businesses everywhere.

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About the Author

Matthew has over 25 years' experience in the IT, cloud and hosting industry gained in a variety of roles spanning project management to product release and product marketing. He's responsible for product marketing for SUSE Enterprise Storage and SUSE's cloud solutions.