Why the ‘digital storage’ growth story has just begun

STORAGE is a growing market driven by several factors. Businesses are most likely able to understand this from the sheer volume of data that they produce on a daily basis versus a few years back.

“For example, with the advancement of camera technology, the resolution of each photo and video we take runs at a higher quality,” said Western Digital’s Director of Sales Engineering – APJ, Haf Saba.

We download content that is richer in detail and larger in size. For businesses, while they may have been collecting data in the past, there wasn’t much value in analysing it to enable better outcomes.

Today, that has changed. Data is far more valuable today than it was due to how we apply it.

For example, scanning a document a decade ago was a common practice and usually for backup or archival purpose.

Now, with the emergence of technology such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, we are able to analyze large volumes of data to mine for insights which then can be applied to drive and enhance business outcomes. Data is the new currency.

As such, data is now becoming more valuable, and we want to collect more of it. For that to happen, we need more storage.

What’s really driving the storage market?

Accelerating digitizing traditional platforms, and the emergence of technology that helps unlock the business value of data, are key in driving the demand for storage.

Data is an integral part of our lives and it is transforming the way we live, learn, work, and play.

Driven by social, search, e-commerce, online banking, navigation, and more, we live in a real-time world in which we want “instant” everything.

Businesses can transform faster, create more value, and achieve new breakthroughs by harnessing the power of data – all through optimizing the performance, resiliency, efficiency, endurance, and longevity of data.  It’s the power of data and how we use it that drives our need to store more of it.

Storage companies are disrupting the industry and creating environments for data to thrive.

By changing the economics of data, accelerating the speed of business, and facilitating a “data forever” architecture, storage companies deliver value through systems and solutions that were hard to do just a few years ago.

Data that was never before saved, is now being kept. Data that was frozen is being brought back online for either analytics or to enable the possibilities of monetization.

“When data lives forever, our dynamic world requires dynamic storage. Infrastructure needs to be an enabler for this new ‘data forever’ paradigm, and traditional IT infrastructure can’t compete,” explained Saba, who will be speaking at length about the importance of storage at the Cloud Expo Asia 2018 in Singapore.

How storage contributes to your digital transformation

Emerging trends such as IoT, analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, cloud, and mobility are pushing the limits of traditional infrastructures. Sometimes, this renders them ineffective.

On top of that, new regulatory requirements, laws, and mandates are making data strategies even more complex.

“With this continued data revolution, IT managers must rethink how data is captured, preserved, accessed, transformed, and how to cost-effectively scale to support data growth for long-term value and protection,” explained Saba.

The old paradigm that data becomes less valuable over time is evolving as we discover that almost all data has hidden-value, yet to be mined, transformed, and analyzed.

Companies that succeed in doing this are gaining valuable insights from massive amounts of data over longer periods of time, and are applying these insights to drive better business impact.

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