​Storage transformation underway as Public Cloud spending prepares to double

David Goulden - CEO, EMC heads up the dominate vendor in the storage space

Organisations will continue to transform their storage environments in 2016, with most expecting to increase their storage spending over the next year.

Notably, 451 Research reveals that the proportion of spending on public cloud storage services will at least double over the next two years, largely at the expense of traditional, on-premises storage.

“The storage infrastructure may have proven itself hardy to change over the years, but it is not immune to the same uber-trends that are fundamentally disrupting the role of IT at organisations of all sizes,” says Simon Robinson, Research Vice President, 451 Research.

“IT managers are recognising the need for storage transformation to meet the realities of the new Digital Economy, especially in terms of improved efficiency and agility in the face of relentless data growth.

“It’s clear from our Q4 study that emerging options, especially Public Cloud Storage and All-Flash Array technologies, will be increasingly important components in this transformation.”

The study focuses on end-user trends in enterprise storage. Based on research conducted with over 700 IT professionals worldwide, the quarterly study combines 451 Research’s analysis with responses from a panel of more than 25,000 senior IT buyers and enterprise technology executives.

Key insights from the study show that storage spending will be healthy in 2016, with over 70 percent of respondents expecting to increase their storage spending over the next 12 months, compared to 2015.

However, storage spending growth in Europe and among very large organisations (over 10,000 employees) will be weaker than average, as will spending in the government and utilities verticals.

On average, spending on public cloud storage will account for 17 percent of total enterprise storage spending by 2017, up from 8 percent today.

In some verticals - such as retail - the public cloud will account for 25 percent of total storage spending by 2017 - spending on on- premises storage will fall from 70 percent in 2015 to 58 percent in 2017.

While the traditional storage players, led by EMC, dominate the list of strategic players today, this looks set to change over the next two years.

In addition, both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft become top five storage vendors by 2017.

“From a storage products perspective, spending will increase the most on public cloud and all-flash arrays, while spending on traditional SAN and NAS products will be more muted,” Robinson adds.

“The largest spending declines will be on tape products. Dealing with data and storage capacity growth is by far the single greatest pain point for storage managers.

“Respondents cited improved backup and disaster recovery as top storage objective for 2016.”