Hype Cycle for Storage and Data Protection Technologies
This Hype Cycle focuses on emerging innovative storage and data protection technologies and assesses their business impact, adoption rate and maturity level to help I&O leaders build adaptable, future-ready storage and data protection platforms for changing business needs.
Strategic Planning Assumptions
- By 2026, large enterprises will triple their unstructured data capacity across their on-premises, edge and public cloud locations, compared to 2023.
- By 2026, 60% of I&O leaders will implement hybrid cloud deployments, which is a significant increase from 20% in 2023.
- By 2026, 25% of external enterprise storage arrays deployed to support primary storage workloads will adopt nonvolatile memory express over fabric (NVMe-oF), compared with less than 10% in 2023.
- By 2026, more than 40% of enterprise storage will be deployed at the edge, which is a significant increase from 15% in 2022.
- By 2028, consumption-based STaaS will replace over 35% of enterprise storage capex, up from less than 10% in 2023.
Analysis
What You Need to Know
The storage and data protection market is evolving to address new challenges in enterprise IT. Exponential data growth, public cloud integration, talent acquisition challenges, new workloads and cyberthreats are demanding changes in storage platforms and operational models. Requirements for robust, secure, simple and performant storage are on the rise. In addition, the storage and data services must be scalable and sustainable. As data centers are no longer the centers of data, I&O leaders expect to deliver storage services and data platforms capable of hybrid cloud data flow at the edge and in the multiple public clouds.
As technology continues to advance, it’s crucial to stay informed about the latest trends and innovations in storage and data protection. In this research, Gartner has assessed 23 of the most hyped storage and data protection technologies that are reshaping how we store and manage data, offering faster performance, scalability, cloud integration and enhanced flexibility.
The Hype Cycle
I&O leaders responsible for storage and data protection are reacting to the changing requirements of digital business, unpredictable data growth, introduction of new workloads and the desire to leverage public and hybrid cloud that include core-to-edge capabilities. This research informs I&O leaders and infrastructure technology vendors about innovative storage technologies and assesses their business impact, maturity level and how quickly enterprises are adopting them.
More than half of the technologies reviewed in the 2023 Hype Cycle are poised to mature during the next five to 10 years. At the same time, 65% of technologies have the potential to deliver major benefits if driven and justified by genuine business requirements. To provide clearer, more focused research to support your analysis and planning, we have only included a subset of the most innovative technologies and removed those that are well-adopted and understood.
In 2023, analyst observed a high concentration of technologies at the peak of the hype addressing the most prominent market trends such as hybrid cloud, containers support, data management and as-a-service offerings. This year, enterprise information archiving and copy data management were dropped as they are well understood and adopted. Storage-class memory SSDs and persistent-memory DIMMS were dropped as they are no longer hyped or promoted. Fast-moving technologies include function accelerator cards and hybrid cloud storage. This year, Gartner introduced five new profiles: DNA Storage, Cloud Infrastructure Recovery Assurance Software, Isolated Recovery Environment, Digital Communication Governance and Storage-as-a-Service.
