Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2024. Read them in this 16th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Next Year’s Hidden Trends in Cloud Storage and How Everyone Will Be Impacted
By Nilay Patel, VP of Sales at Backblaze
While cloud storage has matured to the point that it’s a necessity for a modern organization, companies consistently are looking to evaluate their costs and find room for improvement. As a result, it’s still a source of innovation and value for IT departments that pay close attention to emerging trends and opportunities for new innovations. Enterprises need to pay close attention to three key developments in the cloud industry for next year and should be ready to plan accordingly: waning acceptance for costly cloud budgets, easier, effective solutions around ransomware protections and disaster recovery, and object storage as a driver for AI innovation.
Prediction #1: Cloud Operations Budgets Get Grilled
We’re at the end of a cycle that started in March 2020, when IT departments had to make work from home (WFH) a thing that could work practically overnight. There was a lot of overspending that folks just accepted. And of course, that emergency spending continued on for a couple of years.
Now, those teams have to provide a very similar level of service as they were during the emergency since most white collar jobs are now permanently hybrid. However, thanks to macroeconomic uncertainty and simple good business sense, leadership is pushing for cloud spend to be optimized. Organizations will have to decide whether to solidify this spending as part of their everyday budget or start cost cutting in other areas.
At the same time, vendors that sell collaboration storage such as Box and Microsoft are starting to cut unlimited plans to save on their own operational costs. This is happening regardless of industry verticals-even for universities and nonprofits-and customers who had petabytes of data stored across these systems are now facing removal. The combination of cost-cutting at both ends will help start an exodus from those traditional vendors as anxious and budget-strapped organizations search for less expensive options.
Prediction #2: Ransomware Protection Increases
In a positive trend, one area where investment should increase is protections against ransomware as well as other disaster recovery options. Organizations have moved past panicking that cyberattacks are inevitable, and are now realizing protection is not as complicated nor as expensive as they thought it would be. This will drive further momentum as recognition of fact gets circulated around, encouraging further investment.
On top of the ease of use and deployment, IT departments will also be able to justify the investment as far less expensive than the average downtime and mitigation costs that result from a ransomware attack. Those can take 23 days and can cost $1.54 million-not just payments but the labor, lost opportunities, and device replacements that are needed to fix everything.
Prediction #3: Easier Object Storage Options Will Fuel AI Innovation
Object storage, the computer data storage approach that manages data in a structurally flat environment, will go “mainstream” for more than IT organizations. While it’s the least expensive and most scalable storage system, most enterprises still mainly rely on block storage (SAN on-premises) and file storage (which exists on a network) in the standard hierarchy of files scattered across enterprises. That said, object storage hasn’t been readily accessible via many tools that expect to have access to enterprise data – with AI being the prime example. Recently, Amazon introduced S3 Express One Zone, object storage designed for massive AI applications with higher speed, higher scalability, and lower latency. This will enable new applications that in the past developers wouldn’t have been able to write without spending a huge amount of money-but not just for AWS customers.
Whenever there’s new innovation that comes out of AWS, ecosystems are created around it and, typically-thanks to AWS’s complexity and high prices-alternative approaches from other companies bring more value to businesses. The expectation is a broader impact where the tooling, model training, AI inference, and other AI oriented workflows will support data stored in object storage as a matter of course. Organizations who are competing with AWS, or looking for a less expensive approach, will be able to unlock these new performance capabilities via using object storage from other providers.
2024 Presents Opportunities for Every Company to Succeed
2024 isn’t about having to cut costs, but how to invest wisely with cloud budgets to get the best value. Smart IT leaders will focus on finding new opportunities to unlock value and cut out unnecessary costs within their own organizations so that they can scale and thrive into 2025.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nilay has served as our vice president of sales since 2009. Nilay was part of the founding team at Backblaze and launched Backblaze Business Backup and the partner programs. In early 2011, Nilay left to co-found Selligy, which was acquired by Veeva Systems (NYSE: VEEV) in mid-2015. Soon thereafter, Nilay returned to bring his unique background in development and sales back to Backblaze. In addition to Selligy, Nilay was the first employee in Europe for both Electric Cloud and MailFrontier. He opened up the territories by selling products to Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens Medical, Bertelsmann, and other large enterprises. Nilay earned a B.S. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.
