Data storage company, Scality, has predicted that, on the back of a year which has seen an unprecedented increase in ransomware attacks and unstructured data growth, data protection and intelligence will be the among the main drivers in successful data storage in 2023.
In the present economic climate of higher costs and geopolitical uncertainty, Scality’s forecast considers how big data storage solutions will evolve to meet these challenges, including how data security will remain a key storage industry driver, and how the Three I’s — intelligent features, innovation, and integration — present new hope for data centre efficiency and effectiveness.
“Data security considerations have always been top of mind for our customers, but in 2023, IT leaders will evaluate every solution, including data storage, by its ability to protect data from the multiplicity of threat vectors,” said Paul Speciale, chief marketing officer at Scality. “In 2022 the data storage industry evolved to embrace advances in AI/ML, hybrid clouds and edge computing that enabled greater data sovereignty and flexibility. In 2023, the pace will accelerate so IT teams will obtain long-promised features that deliver a significant uptick in efficiency.”
Supply chain issues and economic challenges will continue to impact storage projects in 2023, with the exception being those that can show tangible ROI on ransomware protection initiatives. This will present an opportunity for big data storage solutions with the intelligence to address current gaps in multi-level security, detection and data immutability for ransomware protection and fast business recoverability. Moreover, solutions that can provide AI-based anomaly-detection capabilities for detecting ransomware attacks will become more mainstream in the near future.
Additionally, malware and ransomware attacks have ballooned such that intrusions now occur every few minutes across the globe, costing businesses millions of dollars per incident and consuming untold IT cycles. Scality predicts that open-source software dependencies will become an increasing threat vector, causing enterprises to more carefully evaluate and vet these technologies before employing them at scale.
In terms of unstructured data, customers need intelligent data search methods to optimise data analytics and mining of the trillions of unstructured data objects they have aggregated in object storage solutions. In 2022 cloud vendors such as Amazon and others made a step in the right direction by introducing a myriad of search tools and services. But there remains an unmet need for intelligence that allows the all-important “aha!” moment to arrive far faster.
Scality predicts that, in 2023, search and query capabilities for unstructured data storage solutions will mature, and vendors will integrate them with standard access methods, while still guaranteeing enterprise-class security and auditing. This will prove doubly advantageous in simplifying application development and allowing object storage resources to serve as the single solution for unstructured data storage and query.
Other predictions include a slowdown of open-source adoption due to malicious software supply chain attacks, a rise in importance for green storage innovation, and tighter integration of managed cloud services and object storage.
