Barracuda Networks, Inc., a provider of cloud-connected security and storage solutions, shares its outlook for the storage industry in 2015.
2014 was an exciting year for the storage industry as more companies continued to move their primary storage to the cloud and adopt solutions like Microsoft Office 365 for email. Barracuda expect these trends to continue in 2015 along with a few others – here are Barracuda’s 2015 storage predictions.
- Momentum around adoption of cloud resources for primary workloads will continue to accelerate as companies look to optimize IT management solutions. This has been a trend with startups and very small companies, but the value proposition really starts to look appealing for mid-sized and large companies in 2015. Migration from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud is not trivial. Making the decision for a startup with no historic data is easy, but established businesses will need a plan, and likely will need help with legacy issues that will be dominated by Microsoft Exchange servers and Microsoft Outlook PST files, database-driven applications, and file server data. Companies that don’t have a cloud legacy will struggle to service these new use cases.
- Based on our customer research, Microsoft Office 365 leads the way for businesses transitioning to the cloud and will distance itself from other players in this space, while Google will continue to be strong in education. Information management, archiving and backup solutions for these email-dominated environments are critical.
- IT organizations will find it increasingly hard to support the modern workforce without deploying cloud technologies. Applications and data will rapidly migrate to the cloud and end users will expect to be able to access anything from anywhere at any time. Mobility is no longer a feature – it’s the way people work. It’s also not just about end users – IT administrators will also demand cloud-enabled management solutions and mobile apps that enable them to work anywhere. Security and data protection will need to be designed for the cloud, not bolted on.
- As more companies move their primary data to the cloud, someone is going to discover (in a dramatic way!) that having primary data and backup storage in one cloud is a bad idea. It’s an accepted best practice to store backups outside of the primary storage environment. The cloud is no different.
- File sync and share as a standalone business has jumped the shark. In 2014, all the largest players have heavily invested in complementary technologies and will reap the benefit of that investment in 2015 as smaller players are pushed out and the market consolidates. In the cloud, putting things in ‘boxes’ is no longer enough.
- Email has put a big hurt on the fax machine over the last decade. In 2015, document workflow solutions and eSignature will do more of the same to pen and paper. It makes no sense to do 99% of our work electronically only to go searching for a printer or a fax machine or a FedEx box for the last step. Smartphones are ubiquitous, and they enable eSignature from any location at any time. The productivity impact is huge.
- Tape still doesn’t die this year. Some businesses continue to manage legacy tape environments for long-term archival retention even after they have moved to disk and to the cloud for disaster recovery. The market will continue to move away from tape even for archival use cases, and will look to cloud technologies like Amazon Glacier for long-term, extremely low cost archival retention.
Barracuda provides cloud-connected security and storage solutions that simplify IT. The company is trusted by more than 150,000 organisations worldwide.