What I&O Leaders Need to Know: Gartner’s 2024 Market Guide for Hybrid Cloud Storage

If you are an I&O leader approaching an on-premises storage hardware refresh, now is the right time to rethink whether this is the right move for your company. Ten years ago? Defensible. Seven? Debatable, given how companies that transitioned to cloud back then are so far ahead in what they’re doing with their data now. Today? There is no question. All the signs are pointing to hybrid cloud storage as the way forward for enterprises. Gartner is projecting the percentage of I&O leaders who implement hybrid cloud file deployments to triple in the next few years.

As I reported in a previous post, the top I&O leaders are transitioning from learning about new hybrid technologies to implementing them on a global scale. To help you make the best decision, we are offering Gartner’s latest Market Guide for Hybrid Cloud Storage to our readers to help you get up to speed on the critical trends and considerations.

What to look for in the Guide

Gartner’s Market Guide for Hybrid Cloud Storage includes key findings & recommendations, a concise overview of the hybrid cloud storage market, explanations of the four different hybrid cloud deployment scenarios, and plenty more valuable insights, including:

• Popular use cases among I&O leaders
• Hybrid cloud types that address each use case
• How hybrid cloud solutions are evolving
• Which value-added data services to expect
• Representative vendors in each hybrid cloud category

Gartner does not endorse any specific products, but the guide makes several very important statements about what enterprises should expect from a solution, including the capacity to “facilitate seamless data services across different environments, including disparate data centers, co-locations, edge locations and public cloud infrastructure.” We could not agree more with that point.

Where Nasuni Fits

Gartner positions Nasuni in the Hybrid Cloud Platform and Data Transfer Sector category, along with select products from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. This was no surprise. Our hyperscale partners, who provide the backend object store and compute layers for the Nasuni File Data Platform, frequently refer prospects to Nasuni when the customer requires a hybrid cloud storage system with integrated data security and no scalability limits.

A few other key takeaways from the guide:

• Hybrid cloud solutions now provide much more than storage or data protection alone, offering data insights, mobility across deployments, and other services. Gartner suggests evaluating providers based on the added services offered
• Backup or disaster recovery, burst for capacity or tiering, and storage standardization are still the most popular use cases for hybrid implementation
• I&O leaders are no longer going to be data-center-centric teams focused on physical infrastructure; they are now charged with managing data services that can be delivered anywhere
• Hybrid cloud advances in data resilience, capacity management, flexibility, portability, and resource optimization “lead to operational excellence, resulting in improved service performance and overall efficiency”
• Gartner recommends looking beyond price per terabyte and evaluating the full economic impact of a hybrid cloud solution on your organization
• The firm suggests preparing for a long-term relationship with your hybrid cloud storage provider of choice

This last recommendation is an important one. You need to partner with a company you can trust. We prioritize our people and our relationships with our customers, and once you have a better sense of the hybrid cloud storage market and the varieties of solutions and deployment models available, I am sure you’ll want to take a deeper look at Nasuni.

Our File Data Platform provides effortless scalability, fast edge performance, and built-in security against ransomware and other threats. The Nasuni architecture brings fast data access to the edge, facilitating edge computing scenarios and rapid data ingest – ultimately improving workflow processes and the speed of decision-making. With data utilization insights from Nasuni IQ and a single consolidated approach to data management, you will be laying the foundation for a successful AI strategy.

Click through and read the guide. It’s an easy way to familiarize yourself with the growing and evolving hybrid cloud storage market. Then, reach out to us if you have any questions about how Nasuni can help.