Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022.  Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

The Storage Solution Landscape

By Paul Speciale, CMO, Scality

Coming off a year when ransomware attacks have exploded, skills shortages remain, and cloud adoption continues, we at Scality anticipate the following impacts to the storage solution landscape.

Prediction #1: Increasingly sophisticated cyberattack solutions will be built directly into the design of storage solutions to counter the wave of zero day exploits and ransomware attacks.

Cyber attacks, particularly ransomware, have reached record proportions. High value corporate data faces significant risk. Therefore, we expect commercial solutions will be designed with more sophisticated, integrated mechanisms for earlier detection, prevention and ultimately for recovery from attacks that delete, modify, or encrypt stored data. Storage solutions will be combined with advanced application-level, server and network security mechanisms to provide corporations with end-to-end solutions against cyberattacks across their IT stacks.

Since threats continue to evolve, preventing ransomware attacks from occurring entirely will be a false expectation. IT managers will need to deploy solutions that can help detect and recover from these attacks earlier and more efficiently.

New object storage systems have taken data immutability to even higher levels by implementing object locking, along with data retention policies. These effectively render data impervious to deletion or modification for the specified period. We predict these solutions will continue to rise in sophistication and become available from vendors in 2022 and beyond.   

Prediction #2: AI/MLOPS will become a standard part of enterprise and midrange storage products, enabling more robust operations, reducing staffing cost and improving service.

For several years, the data storage industry has recognized a need for increased automation in storage systems management. This need is amplified by data growth, and by predicted shortages in skilled human resources needed to manage these mountains of data. IDC has published reports for "the Future of Work" that provide ominous predictions that a lack of IT skills will affect over 90% of enterprises and will cost them over $6.5 Trillion by 2025. Previous reports have predicted that storage administrators will have to manage 50 times more data in the next decade, but with only a 1.5X increase in the number of skilled personnel.

The integration of AI/MLOps into large-scale data storage offerings will increasingly emerge to help administrators offload and automate processes - and to find and reduce waste and increase overall storage management efficiency.  MLOps can monitor and provide predictive analytics on common manual tasks such as capacity utilization, pending component failures and storage inefficiencies. These innovations wouldn't be possible without the application of ML techniques, and their ability to consume and "train" from extremely granular system logs and event data during real-time operations. 

Prediction #3: Technology and data sovereignty concerns in Europe, the U.S. and Japan will create an industry of local/regional/sovereign service providers.

Global enterprises are growing increasingly concerned about their dependence on technology providers and cloud services based outside of their geographies. Since data is now a highly valued enterprise asset, there are unique considerations pertaining to independence of sovereign data - and we predict that this will result in the creation of new localized services to address those concerns.

With the steady march of cloud service providers, especially worldwide players such as AWS, Azure and GCP, it's no wonder that companies struggle to keep track of the location of their data and the status of their compliance with local data sovereignty regulations they are subject to. Outsourcing and delegating IT services to global cloud service providers for the sake of economics, agility and flexibility does not absolve them of their compliance obligations. Turning a blind eye to their data sovereignty issues is just not an option.

This ushers an industry of local/regional service providers offering sovereign cloud services to captive markets by ensuring the data stays with specified borders. In addition, a hybrid cloud approach combining the public cloud with a private cloud powered by an on-prem solution, such as Scality RING, will certainly help with not only the data sovereignty mandate but with data security and privacy issues as we

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

As chief product officer, Paul Speciale leads Scality'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.