Storage market is one of the most fiercely competitive among all domains of Information Technology. Hence, knowledge about the storage trends in 2017 can be highly valuable. As far as the current scenario is concerned, there are signs of major upheavals that could be responsible for turning over the industry.

Such kind of upending isvery much expected in the technology intensive industrysuch as Information Technology. There is an accelerated phase of evolution that has potential to completely transform the storage market in the approaching decade. However it would be prudent to focus on the very near future by understanding the views of stalwarts of the industry.

Shift to Cloud Storage- Major Highlight

With reference to a plethora of surveys and predictions, cloud is going to become a major storage resource for growing number of enterprises. The existing cloud storage market is poised to double in the year 2017. This can only be considered as a small beginning of the mammoth potential of cloud to act as a significant storage solution. We need to understand that cloud based storage is going to be the major driving force of the entire storage market in years to come.

In response to more consumption of cloud storage, there is a strong possibility of cost reduction. This is also evident from the fact that Microsoft announced a major price reduction of its Azure services in the month of October.

One of the major impediments to cloud storage adoption is the complexity of transition. One can expect emergence of migration tools in 2017 that will be aimed at removing the roadblocks to cloud storage adoption.

Solid State Drive to Become a New Normal

There are many changes in the way enterprises are addressing their storage needs. Similar to cloud adoption, one more transition as far as the storage options are concerned is Solid State Drives.

The shift from Hard Disk Drives to Solid State Drives has been slowly happening for the past few years. This is mainly due to superior features of SSDs including a better performance, superior speed in comparison with HDDs, and a more powerful handling of enterprise workloads.

Price difference was the only hindrance to the widespread adoption of Solid State Drives. According to number of experts, the price difference between SSD and HDD is going to be wiped out in 2017. In the wake of a steep decline in prices of SSDs, we can now witness more and more enterprises to embrace SSD as their storage option.

That may not make HDDs totally obsolete because these will be used for the purpose of data storage over a long period of time such as data archival.

Emergence of Regional Cloud Providers

Thanks to extensive cloud adoption by businesses from all categories, competition is definitely going to be further intensified among the big cloud hosting providers including AWS, Google, and Microsoft Azure in the New Year 2017. This is an expected scenario and it does not need any studies to predict the same.

However, what is more interesting is the new kind of competition emerging from regional players. Cloud is going to open up amazing range of opportunities to regional cloud providers who will also be strongly competing with the big cloud providers. These new opportunities will be mostly in the niche segment that will fulfill need of adding value to customers.

Regional cloud providers will focus on customized services to their customers such as estimation and analysis of annual sales, helping companies set up modular data centers, and so forth.

Increased Adoption of Software Defined Storage

Software defined storage will be adopted by large number of enterprises to cater to the needs of big data initiatives. This will mark a shift from use of software defined storage for smaller projects to storage needs of big data, which is assuming greater importance in large number of enterprises. Software defined data offers multiple benefits to organizations such as ease of moving traditional applications.

In Conclusion

It will be easy to fulfill the future needs of storage market by preparing to get a stronghold on these changes. Most of these changes are driven by new technologies. Businesses must brace themselves to adapt to the challenges by turning their advantages into key strengths that can be used by every business.

Interesting Topics To Read:-

Why use cloud storage instead of local storage?

Cloud Storage Technology