Scality, leader in software solutions for global data orchestration and distributed file and object storage, predicts that data storage will become massively decentralised in 2020 and hybrid cloud will become the defacto standard for organisations as they seek ways to manage and use data efficiently and intelligently. Scality looks at the storage industry and the likely developments in AI, hybrid cloud, object storage, cyber security and sustainability that will shape it as it moves into a new decade.

“Though the trends we’ve been seeing in 2018 and 2019 will continue, and even accelerate, the data storage industry in 2020 will look very different from what it was the last two years,” said Jérôme Lecat, Scality’s CEO and co-founder. “We will see continuing evolution and advancement of cloud, edge empowerment, data collection for AI and more, as digital transformation remains top of mind. As organisations tackle these changes, storage decentralisation across public and private cloud and edge will necessitate more robust management and data visibility solutions, becoming a significant focus in the year ahead.”

Paul Speciale, Scality’s Chief Product Officer added, “IT priorities are shifting towards flexibility, security and sustainability. ‘All-cloud’ initiatives are giving way to hybrid and data management solutions for greater agility and control, avoiding dependence on a single vendor.”

1. Hybrid cloud will become the default deployment architecture for medium and large enterprises. Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google are all investing heavily, not only in solutions that connect on-premises infrastructure to their own public clouds, but also in cross-cloud interoperability and management. This blurring of lines between vendors and technologies will benefit enterprises who are looking not to be locked into a single vendor, but for the optimal solution to specific business problems.

1. Object storage at the edge will be on flash. Object storage will move into the edge for applications that capture large data streams from a wide variety of mobile, IoT and other connected devices. This will include event streams and logs, sensor and device data, vehicle drive data, image and video media data and more, with high data rates and high concurrency from thousands or more simultaneous data streams. These applications will be developed for cloud-native deployment, and will therefore naturally embrace RESTful object style storage protocols, making object storage on flash media an optimal choice on the edge to support this emerging class of data-centric applications.    
   
2. New ways of identifying patients, customers, and depositors will be developed, as the rapid pace of hacking and data leaks continues. There is huge value in stored data; and those organisations that hold large volumes of data, hospitals and medical providers for example, will remain strong targets due to the value of the data they hold.

1. Data storage will become massively decentralised resulting in extreme cloud data silos. Enterprises will increasingly leverage a combination of on-premises and public clouds to help solve various business issues, at the same time as adopting edge computing to deploy IT resources near the edge devices they manage. Enterprises will require data management solutions that provide a global namespace across these distributed clouds and data centres in order to simplify data visibility and access.

1. Kubernetes will become the default platform for infrastructure deployment in the data centre. As enterprises transform and adopt cloud-native applications, the need for a standard deployment and orchestration framework for containers will increase, just as it did during the virtual machine wave over the course of the last two decades.
2. Organisations will move away from the unnecessary “rip and replace” culture in order to reduce waste for sustainable and economic reasons. In 2020, IT teams will look to software-defined storage with ultra-strong data resiliency schemes to take data servers to their true end-of-life, rather than replacing them every refresh cycle.