Cloud Storage Overtakes Disk in Enterprise Spending

We’ve finally passed the inflection point. Funds budgeted for cloud storage edged out hard disk drive expenditures for the first time, according to the Storage Trends 2018 survey by Enterprise Storage Forum.

Having designed Nasuni’s technology and business model for the “new disk,” we all believed this day would come. And certainly all the signs pointed to it:

• The cloud businesses of Azure, Amazon, and our other object storage partners continue to grow. Nasuni gets an inside look being #2 in Azure ISV joint wins for Microsoft’s fiscal 2018 that just ended, second only to Veeam.
• Nasuni’s business continues to grow at 60% annually, and we’re now seeing this market momentum extend to Europe.
• TechTarget’s 2018 IT Priorities Survey indicates more enterprises are shifting to cloud storage to deal with surging data growth.
• Early cloud storage security challenges have been mitigated by cloud file services solutions like Nasuni that encrypt data at the edge, in transit, and at rest in private or public cloud storage.

But let’s get back to those Enterprise Storage survey results. Here are a few key takeaways:

• Cloud Storage Spending is on the Rise: 50% of respondents said they expect cloud storage to be their biggest purchase over the next two years, outpacing Flash and HDD.
• Data Will Continue to Grow: Around 40% of IT leaders surveyed expect their storage to grow by more than 100 TB in the next two years.
• The Three Biggest Storage Headaches are Fixed by Cloud Storage: Aging gear, lack of storage capacity, and high costs of operation are the three biggest concerns for IT storage leaders, all of which cloud storage (with Cloud File Services) addresses.
• Backup to Disk is Dying: The number of companies spending on disk-based backup appliances dropped by 35%, and more respondents expect to spend heavily on cloud-based backup and DR as the alternative.

Cloud Storage is the Present … and the Future

As the survey shows, cloud storage is here, and legacy technologies like NAS aren’t making a comeback. The best proof of this is Nasuni’s customers.

TBWA has more than 3 PB of file storage on Nasuni, and the advertising giant is now looking at using Nasuni as part of a multi-cloud strategy to tap the full potential of its creative talent and optimize IT.

Austin Radiological Association (ARA) is using Nasuni with Azure to store and protect nearly 1 million outpatient radiological exams each year, at much lower cost than its previous disk-based NAS infrastructure.

Cushman & Wakefield is seeing massive cost savings and improved data protection as the commercial real estate leader moves hundreds of Windows file servers to Nasuni and Azure storage.

These Nasuni customer stories validate what the Enterprise Storage Forum survey has shown – the shift to cloud storage isn’t just a fad. When paired with the right cloud file services platform, cloud storage is the scalable, resilient, and cost-effective data storage infrastructure of the future.

Ready to see what that future looks like and how it’s being used today?  Request a Nasuni Demo!

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