Data Storage in 2050
Nasuni SVP of Product Nick Burling shares what he thinks data storage in 2050 will look like, as well as other predictions.
January 22, 2025 | Nick Burling

Now that we’re 25 years into the current century, it’s tempting to wonder what our world will look like in 2050. Will space tourism be standard? Will humanity have hotels on the moon or Mars? And will we stream content from orbiting data centers? While the future of data might not have the mass appeal of other sci-fi trends, here at Nasuni we’re expecting data storage and access, and how we treat data generally, to change significantly in the decades ahead. Before we explore our projections, let’s look at how data storage has changed in the last few decades.
Data Fluidity In The Modern Enterprise
In the 1990s, data began moving off dedicated, isolated hardware boxes and onto local area networks. This approach didn’t eliminate data silos. It simply made the silos larger and more difficult to manage, even if it enabled users and applications to access data more efficiently.
Around 2010, the cloud emerged as a viable data storage medium for large organizations and certain types of data. The shift away from local, siloed hardware to the cloud then accelerated rapidly during the pandemic.
Today, data is generated everywhere, from user laptops and smartphones to IoT machines in factories and cloud-based virtual machines. For companies relying on traditional storage, the data remains siloed in place. Nasuni customers enjoy a different kind of infrastructure. Data moves to the cloud for consolidation, protection, cost-effective storage, and the use of data analytics services and AI tools.
Yet it can’t remain in the cloud. This same data needs to be available to any user or machine, anywhere in the world, as quickly as possible. With Nasuni, data isn’t so much stored in a single spot. It flows where it is needed. In the future, capabilities like this will be expected and the data silo will be eliminated for good.
Here are a few other trends we foresee:
1. Intelligent Automation
In 2050, you’re not going to have to manage any of the processes described above. Data will immediately be made available wherever it needs to be once it’s generated. Assuming you grant permission, everything you see or say will be instantly recorded and available for immediate analysis and AI training.
Previously generated data — whether a recording of a videoconference or a hyper-realistic three-dimensional model of an electronic component — will be available for instant recall by your AI assistant. For enterprises, data will automatically flow based on your organization’s internal policies, automation settings, and intelligent services that map data consumption patterns and replicate them independently.
2. Lightning-fast Performance
The speed of light will still be a constraint, but performance and access to data will improve even over the extended distances of space. The aforementioned automation of data transfer will anticipate the need for data to be somewhere so that it’s intelligently cached close to the user or machine that needs it before that person or device actually attempts to access the data.
Here at Nasuni we’re already leading the way in terms of global file synchronization and data flow speeds, driven in part by intelligent pattern-recognition systems like Global File Acceleration.
3. Energy Efficiency
Will we still have massive cloud data centers? Yes, but the energy appetite of AI is already forcing the hyperscalers to pursue more efficient technology. Today the cloud giants are embracing nuclear to power their clouds. This is bold, given the controversial history of the energy source, but we may go even bolder.
Lumen Orbit just raised $10M to explore space-based data centers. A separate European effort investigated the feasibility of this approach as well. The proposed orbiting data centers would have abundant access to solar energy unobscured by cloud cover. Massive data transfer would be complex but not impossible. Maybe this would even lead to a new tier of storage: hot, cold, glacial, and interplanetary.
(Was that a storage archiving joke? Yes. My apologies.)
4. Innovation for Less
The only constraint more reliable than the speed of light? Companies will always want to pay as little as possible to store and manage data. IT budgets won’t expand exponentially. These fundamentals won’t change.
As energy costs rise, data volumes balloon, and data complexity increases as formats become interchangeable, we will need to develop new technologies to store, protect and instantly deliver data to where it needs to be. Older but still valuable data will need to be reduced so it can be stored in the least expensive way possible while still being accessible when needed.
This will drive the development of new storage media. Whether DNA and other biological forms of data storage will prove viable in the next few decades is up for debate, but it is reasonable to assume that someone will find a creative new way to store digital information in a cheap, secure and lasting way.
The Data Rules Remain the Same
Ultimately, as technology advances, many of the same basic rules will remain. People and organizations won’t want to get rid of their data, but they won’t want to spend too much preserving it, either. They will want their data protected and available everywhere, whether they’re working out of an earth-bound office or relaxing on a lounger inside their favorite moon hotel.
As anyone who follows Nasuni knows well, you don’t have to wait for data storage to undergo this fundamental shift away from siloed infrastructure. You just need to accept that data needs to be fluid to deliver value and trade your outdated data paradigms for the hybrid cloud infrastructure of the future today.
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