By Judy Kaldenberg, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Nexsan

With increased AI initiatives, customer-driven analytics and hyper-valuation of personal data, organizations will need to find the best way to store, leverage and protect their business information throughout next year and beyond. The copious amount of data collected and the ever-increasing need to safeguard that information from a rise in cybercriminal activity will force businesses to rethink their storage infrastructure strategy to accommodate for growth, cost and security to best satisfy changing organizational needs. Ideally, companies will adopt one or more of the following approaches that will affect the direction of the storage market in 2025.

Organizations will increasingly employ the ‘Goldilocks' principle

As businesses look to control costs in anticipation of a potential economic downturn, finding the sweet spot between having enough capacity to store mission-critical data while minimizing storage spending will be seen as a higher priority in the upcoming year. While there are several avenues available to finding what's "just right" in terms of volume, performance, scalability, efficiency and manageability, the best one will be a storage system that accommodates present-day requirements with the ability to adapt in the future as workloads evolve.

A little bit of this, a little bit of that

Organizations looking to gain the versatility required to right-size their storage needs will seek out systems that combine different features and functions into one, such as hybrid arrays with flash for performance and spinning disk for deep capacity. Storage systems that can do a little bit of everything - efficiently unify different platforms and protocols (like block and file) to support different use cases while offering a variety of data management options for protection, security and business continuity - will be the ones most attractive to those needing to balance often-times divergent financial and operational requirements.

Innovation will provide improved value

In order to support core operations and evolving digital markets, companies will turn to smarter, more modern technologies that provide bulletproof backup and recovery, streamline infrastructure, increase application performance, safeguard data from external threats, enhance productivity and more. By leveraging newer, more innovative storage solutions rather than riding it out with traditional offerings, businesses small and large will find a tremendous amount of value that will enable them to gain a competitive edge.

Safety, safety, safety

Cyberattacks will continue to see an uptick in 2025 over already elevated levels of activity occurring in recent years. One area that remains particularly vulnerable is backups. Tamper-proofing data requires either write once/read many (WORM) formats or immutable backups. Immutability is critical in defending against ransomware and other cybercrimes. Immutable data remains protected from unauthorized changes, eliminating chances for malware infection, corruption or manipulation. Tamper-proof and immutable backups will be seen as key components to keeping business information safe and protected.

Live for today, plan for tomorrow

There's an adage currently making the rounds that the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.  The second-best time is now. While 2025 will see organizations right sizing their storage infrastructures to match today's business environment, they will also need to plan to accommodate inevitable data growth by future proofing their storage infrastructure. Whatever storage protocols or hardware put into place must account for evolving workloads, data types, security and compliance policies, and more. In order to best prepare for storage needs both now and in the future, the upcoming year will see increased adoption of scalable storage systems that can grow as capacity needs increase to better offer flexibility to meet future requirements.

Storage remains a critical component of every organization. Whether new systems were just implemented or refreshes are waiting to happen, businesses will need to evaluate their storage infrastructures in 2025 in order to ensure optimal business operations, protect against rising cybersecurity risks or properly balance TCO against the value of data under management. Only that way will they find a solution that is just right for them.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Judy Kaldenberg is Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Nexsan, where she leverages her strategic insights and leadership skills to craft and execute impactful strategies that address increasing market demands for data storage and security.