Do organizations need to adapt to latest technology trends in the data storage area?

The explosion of data, its criticality, and the increasing dependency of businesses on digital information is leading to larger and more complex information storage environments that are challenging to manage.

Organizations evolve over a period of time by creating value, and to create value quickly and cost-effectively they select technologies that can facilitate that growth.

That being said, let us look at the key challenges for data storage and how new trends can potentially impact a much larger market with the value proposition they are bringing in.

Key Challenges

IT/storage managers and storage professionals across companies of all sizes face the following mission-critical challenges:

• Managing storage growth

• Designing, deploying and managing backup, recovery, and archive solutions

• Making informed strategic/big-picture decisions

• Designing, deploying, and managing disaster recovery solutions

• Designing, deploying, and managing storage in a virtualized server environment

• Addressing the lack of skilled storage professionals

• Designing, deploying, and managing storage in cloud computing environments

• Addressing the lack of skilled cloud technology professionals

• Convincing higher management to adopt cloud

• Providing infrastructure for Big Data analytics

• Managing external cloud service providers

Trends in Data Storage

• Cloud: Amazon EC2, Redshift, etc. Value: subscription based and on demand elasticity
• Open source: HDFS, HIVE, Cassandra, MongoDB, Rocks DB, etc. Value: performance & relative cost

In memory: HANA, etc. Value: Performance

Now organizations need to decide if they are satisfied with the current storage mechanisms or they need to upgrade their data storage architecture with the one or combination of the latest technologies to get optimal benefit.

As depicted in the picture above data storage market is at the conjunction point of maturity and latest innovations in the same area. Organizations need to realize that it would be beneficial for them to increase the pace of growth with the adoption of latest technologies in the data storage area.

And the best way to do this would be to identify the use cases, which would bring in value to justify their investment in new technologies and then begin to evolve further.