How cloud changed the concept of data storage

BANGALORE, INDIA: The world is moving towards a cloud economy where a completely new paradigm in storage is emerging. The cloud uptake may have been slow in India, to begin with, but is gaining momentum now in enterprise as well as consumer spaces.

Its adoption is expected to grow at 6.8 per cent in large and medium enterprises in India, says IDC, with a CAGR of 40 per cent over five years making it worth $541 million by 2014.

This huge growth of cloud is being led by mobility and the consumerisation of IT. Gartner and IDC predict that two-thirds of the computing devices by 2015 will be smartphones and media tablets, and these will drive the demand for storage in the cloud. The cloud is causing an uncontrollable data growth, with large amounts of data being created and touched upon by almost every possible stakeholder in the system, irrespective of their sizes.

The cloud has also changed the concept of data storage. It is no more about performance and reliability only. Today’s storage must be able to factor in for the uncontrollable data growth and the ever-growing demand for content. At Seagate, we expect 61 per cent of all data to shift to the cloud by 2020, of which two-thirds will be in personal clouds.

We also see new cloud platforms emerging. Enterprises and telcos have their own clouds through which they run their applications and store data. There are content delivery networks (CDNs) that store and serve a large part of the Internet content from graphics, URLs to live streaming media and social networks. We

carry the mobile clouds with us everywhere and use it to access content from anywhere, anytime. Public clouds are growing and so is our usage of them in running personal mail, business apps, storage, etc. And then, of course, there are personal clouds in the homes. According to Gartner, the personal cloud will replace the PC as the location where users access their content, synchronising across multiple connected devices.

This will lead to the growth of networkable home storage and wireless storage devices that help consumers create their personal clouds. IDC estimates that 23 per cent of the total enterprise compute capacity shipped in 2011 was the enterprise HDD capacity demand for both public and private cloud services. This is expected to triple in the coming ten years.

This digital transformation has been so sudden and its expansion is so rapid that it has put a massive pressure on storage organizations to adapt, innovate, and deliver. By 2025, according to McKinsey, this new evolving digital economy is expected to become the same size as the 1995 physical economy. This will bring in an enormous amount of new data, more need of storage systems, a higher need of performance and reliability, and an ever growing demand of storage solutions for the cloud.

The author is country manager for India & SAARC at Seagate Technology