Resilience, sustainability, zero trust, AI, cloud, data sovereignty - there are several topics that came up time and again as we asked the industry what they felt would be 'top of mind' over the coming year. And running through all of these and other themes was the Covid-19 pandemic and its ongoing impact not just on storage or even IT, but on how the entire world works. While most of us feel that we are at last seeing a light at the end of the tunnel as far as the worst health effects of the virus, few would question that we are still some way off a return to 'normal'.

What cannot be denied is that we now face an increasingly digital world, one that has changed much faster than even hardened futurologists might have predicted 2 or 3 years ago. Julian Boneham of Node4 comments: "Organisations have been contending with managing ever-growing volumes of data for years whilst facing demands for faster and improved data visualisation to enable more informed business decisions, but over the last 12 months, this has been exacerbated by the changes that remote working has forced upon businesses. Adding to this challenge is that data is increasingly shared in different formats and stored in different locations - from private infrastructure to public cloud. This causes challenges in supporting and managing the databases, as well as presenting difficulties in getting meaningful insights from the data to aid effective business decision making. As such, in 2022, we are likely to see increased demand from customers for a modern data platform, where all of their data is easily accessible within a modernised data warehouse. This approach will give access to the tooling within public cloud platforms, such as AI and machine learning, enabling predictive analytics as opposed to just business intelligence."

Building in protection Sergei Serdyuk of NAKIVO fears that the growth in remote/home working has opened up new threats for organisations: "The hybridisation of many organisations' work environments to accommodate remote workspaces has undoubtedly reaped various benefits. However, this expansion across geographic boundaries has also presented critical challenges to data protection and security. The transition created more potential access points for hackers to carry out successful attacks and steal or encrypt sensitive data. To combat this, we see companies prioritising visibility into the threat landscape to identify new vulnerabilities in order to swiftly address them before disaster can strike. Disaster recovery testing, strict access control and similar preventive measures will be crucial to minimise risks of data loss."

Scality's Paul Speciale agrees up to a point: "High value corporate data is at huge risk. In 2022, commercial data storage solutions will be designed and available with more sophisticated, integrated mechanisms for earlier detection, prevention and recovery from attacks that delete, modify or encrypt stored data. Storage solutions will be combined with advanced application-level, server and network security mechanisms to provide corporations with end-to-end solutions against cyber-attacks across their IT stacks."

Cyber resilience will become a key focus, says Infinidat's Eric Herzog: "Across the enterprise data and cyber resilience has become a necessity not a 'nice to have'. If an enterprise or service provider does not have cyber resilience for their storage estate, they will be vulnerable to relentless cyber-attacks. In short, it is not 'if' you will suffer a cyberattack, it is when and how often. Robust data and cyber resilient storage will be firmly at the forefront of every enterprise's corporate cybersecurity strategy."

What does this mean for the humble backup vendor? JG Heithcock of Retrospect says: "In 2022, the 3-2-1 backup rule will continue to be the golden rule of complete data protection. There will be various options available for implementing 3-2-1 workflows. The first possibility will be disk and cloud. Combining local disks and cloud storage locations is a common pattern for a backup strategy. An available backup on a local disk translates into very fast recovery time, as the local network allows for much higher bandwidth. A remote backup on a cloud storage location insulates the organisation's data from disaster, malware, and other problems that arise. The second option will be network-attached storage and cloud. Leveraging an on-site NAS ensures a large, dedicated storage pool and high bandwidth for backups. Transferring those backups to the cloud as an offline process allows administrators to avoid touching the original source multiple times. The third option will be disk and tape. Disk remains the most common storage media, and tape continues to make strides in speed and storage capacity."

Surya Varanasi of Retrospect's parent company StorCentric expands on this theme: "Today's digital transformation strategies would be remiss if data protection and business continuity were not at the top of the list of considerations. This is especially true in 2022, when data centre managers are not just concerned with equipment malfunction, but also insider threats and external cybercriminal activity, such as ransomware attacks. So, capabilities such as immutable volume and file system snapshots that deliver secure point-in-time copies; object locking for bucket or object-level protection for specified retention periods; and pool-scrubbing to detect and remediate bit rot and data corruption will be deemed essential."

Hybrid cloud will continue to grow in acceptance, according to many of our commentators. Betsy Doughty of Spectra comments: "Though 2022 will see many companies aim to transition to storing all of their data in the cloud, some organisations (typically those with massive data sets, such as government, high performance computing, or driverless car companies), may still have a legal requirement to keep their data local in their own or data centre, or might have concerns about giving up their data to a cloud provider (where the cost of getting massive volumes of data out of the cloud is simply not viable form a cost perspective). However, the availability of distributed multi-cloud data management solutions will empower organisations with the choice of keeping some data on prem for control and compliance as well as some in the cloud for usage of cloud services and applications. So 2022 will be about giving organisations the ability to choose, with greater control of where their data resides while enhancing data protection and data usage, independent of the data's physical location."

Chris Greenwood of NetApp expands on the acceleration of cloud use: "We predict that cloud adoption will accelerate faster as the supply chain constraints drive buyers to find alternatives to purchasing traditional on-premise infrastructure to meet demands. From a data perspective, business will need to understand their data more than before, what it is and where it is to ensure it is on the lowest cost tier and not consuming scarce production capacity. Hybrid working environments are the expectation of employees moving forward. The ability to work anywhere will increase the digital capabilities businesses must provide to their staff. The constant simplification of public services access and the services in general will drive broad buy in for digitisation. People are also going to be more comfortable with providing their data because they have experienced the positive impact of virtualised service delivery."

Russ Kennedy of Nasuni offered a different take on how and why organisations are - and aren't moving the cloud: "A surprise in 2021 was companies' reluctance to agree on strategies for moving workloads and data to the cloud. Despite teams being forced to work from home, many in the industry had predicted that IT teams would send workloads and data to the cloud more quickly. Cloud storage providers are breaking through 'traditional' thinking on data management and organisations are modernising with strategies like hybrid approaches - where certain critical assets stay on-premise while other assets/workloads move to the cloud. Perversely, increased supply chain disruption is likely to accelerate the adoption of cloud and managed services - companies facing longer lead times for their on-premise storage hardware orders are having to adapt to cloud service and managed services anyway."

TRUST ISSUES
An increasingly distributed workforce brings with it its own challenges of course, as Aron Brand of CTERA reminds us: "In the aftermath of Covid-19, traditional work models have shattered, leading to a workforce that is scattered across home offices and remote offices. Concurrently, we have also seen sophisticated malicious actors taking advantage of weakly secured edge locations. The new distributed topology of work makes traditional solutions, that rely on location to determine security posture, mostly irrelevant. That is why zero-trust architectures, based on the paranoid principle 'never trust, always verify' are to be absolutely essential in 2022 - expect to see big modernisation projects driven by this trend."

At the same time, the continued explosion in volumes of unstructured data will impact not just security but also governance and data sovereignty conversations. Says Jeff Sizemore of Egnyte: "Protecting unstructured data will likely be one of the biggest challenges in the new year. If you can't see it, you can't govern it. If you can't govern it, you definitely can't manage privacy. However, organisations need to have visibility into structured and unstructured data to build out an effective data governance program, and there are data security and governance tools available to protect that information across the board. We also expect to see ongoing privacy assessments becoming more common. Organisations need to put privacy at the forefront and make sure they are solving the problem holistically in the new year and well beyond."

Davide Villa of Western Digital also voices concerns around data sovereignty and data protection: "The acceleration of digital transformation across all spheres, prompted by the pandemic, has nudged data sovereignty back into the forefront of businesses' minds. As digital transformation matures, IT leaders will be tasked with ensuring data is stored and protected compliantly. In 2022, we will see organisations undergoing a storage revolution to meet data protection demands. For example, in the UK, the NHS must store medical records for one hundred years. With medical information undergoing a major shift to online locations (bolstered by the government's recent commitment of £5.9bn towards digital technology in the NHS), there will be dramatic investment in high capacity, low-latency storage solutions. Medical data is critical and often large meaning that in the coming year, healthcare institutions will be forced to invest in reliable storage architectures or risk compromising data protection standards."

DRAMATIC SAVINGS FROM AI
What of AI? Probably one of the most popular buzzwords across the tech sector in recent years, is it having much impact in the real world as yet? Phil Dunlop of Progress thinks so and believes that AI/ML are starting to be seen as 'part of the norm' rather than an outlier technology: "We are finally seeing AI functionality becoming accessible to everyone, with tagging of content now expected for content management. Customer Journey Mapping, central to any digital experience platform, is real and usable for 2022. It's also an indication that buyers are getting educated and comfortable with advancing technology."

Sascha Giese of SolarWinds agrees, but adds a caveat about current pricing and making sure that potential users are comparing like with like: "The explosion in data available to public sector organisations has made the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning a critical advantage, but the talent and resources required to build solutions in-house is still prohibitive. Ultimately, a machine is faster than a human - or even a group of humans - which means shifting to AI/ML services also allows for cost savings, something that is vital across the sector. Yes, purchasing or subscribing to an AI service and integrating it doesn't come cheap, but it's still far more efficient than a team of 20 data analysts.

"In 2022, we'll start to see AI and ML featured more prominently in organisations' IT environments through the adoption of off-the-shelf AI/ML services. As organisations look to strengthen their security postures in response to the evolving threat landscape, for example, they may look for security tools leveraging AI/ML to perform tasks."

Scality's Speciale argues that data growth - coupled with an ongoing skills shortage - is driving the need for increased automation in storage systems management and AI/ML could fill that gap: "The integration of AI/MLOps into large-scale data processes will increasingly emerge to help administrators offload and automate processes - and to find and reduce waste and increase overall storage management efficiency. MLOps can monitor and provide predictive analytics for common manual tasks including capacity utilisation, pending component failures and storage inefficiencies. Higher value tasks can include determining application IO and performance patterns, to automatically adjust Quality of Service and the underlying resources to deliver the needed service levels."

Infinidat's Herzog agrees: "In 2022, what will differentiate your storage solutions, will be the use of AI inside of your storage. By utilising new and advanced AI technologies across the enterprise, in conjunction with software-defined storage, companies will be able to experience dramatic savings on their CAPEX and OPEX, with real-world performance improvements across all applications and workloads, and substantially improved storage availability."

One area most of our commentators agreed on was the continued growth of NVMe in the enterprise. ATTO's Tim Klein summarised the thoughts of many when he said: "NVMe deployment in enterprise environments gained traction in 2021 and I fully expect that to continue in 2022. One development that will propel NVMe adoption will be how manufacturers develop ways to work with or around NVMe's limitations, in particular scalability and management. Also, the growing availability of PCIe 4 hardware will be helping in accelerating NVMe adoption in enterprise environments. Fibre Channel saw growth in 2021 and that trend is expected to continue next year with the distribution of new PCIe 4 and Gen 7 products and maturation of new technologies like NVMeOFC (NVMe over Fibre Channel). Indeed, NVMeOFC has quietly become a strong alternative to NVMeOF (NVMe over Fabrics) as system builders look for the best way to get the most from networked NVMe storage. Dell recently added support for NVMeOFC in most of their storage products while NetApp has already had it. It would not be surprising to see more vendors explore this undeniably powerful union."

COLD HARD FACTS
At the same time, as IT budgets continue to lag data growth rates, pressure builds for creative ways to cost-effectively store, manage, and extract value from archival and 'cold' data. Tim Sherbak of Quantum says: "Emerging cold storage architectures and services will blur the lines between cold and warm data, with high performance access and simpler cost models allowing for more effective storage and use of cold data sets. Modern cold storage archives were pioneered by some of the world's largest cloud solution providers, but with emerging architectures and services, cold storage solutions will be deployed within an organisation's own data centre, colocation facility or hosted IT environment, whereby data can now be maintained within in-house security perimeters to meet data sovereignty and data residency requirements."

WD's Davide Villa adds: "As the world generates and stores more archival data than ever before, with use cases such as genomics or video footage, cold storage will become the go to for data which must be protected but doesn't need to be accessed within milliseconds. As enterprises start to run back-ups two or three times in various locations, the amount of storage in data centres will further build up and require a serious look at the way organisations archive their data. Most cold storage has been contained on either tape or hard disk drives (HDDs). While tape storage is less expensive than HDDs, it also has a higher data access latency, making it an option for very cold storage. HDDs are evolving to next-gen disk technologies and platforms to improve both the total cost of ownership and accessibility of active archive solutions. These include zoning, higher areal densities, mechanical innovations, and new material innovations."

Quantum's Sherbak, meanwhile, is confident that what he calls 'high performance recovery of tape-based data' will enable organisations to cost-effectively expand the application of artificial intelligence, deep learning and other complex analyses: "As opposed to viewing tape exclusively as an offline resource in offsite storage facilities, large enterprises, cloud-scale solution providers, research facilities, and government agencies will increasingly turn to online, tape-based solutions for petabyte- and exabyte-scale data stores and active, accessible archives."

THE BIG CHALLENGE
Ultimately, much of what our crystal ball gazers predict comes down to a few basic truths: that data volumes will continue to increase, with a shift to more unstructured data sets, that data will be generated in more different locations, whether remote staff, edge devices such as surveillance systems or IoT sensors, and that all that data needs to be managed and considered in terms of privacy, data protection and sovereignty, as well as the value it might bring to the organisation.

Nasuni's Russ Kennedy summarises the thoughts of many when he says: "Over two years of turbulence, organizations have rushed to find adequate solutions to respond to several challenges imposed by altered work patterns and business strategies. Cloud adoptions accelerated many organisations' digital transformation plans; 2022 will continue to mandate flexibility as companies try to align budget expenditures and infrastructure resources to business demands in real time. The big challenge will be for enterprises to maintain, protect and provide access to the sheer volume of their data - growing quicker than ever before due to the pandemic. Businesses need to ensure their data is accessible, scalable, and above all, secure - in order to safe-proof their operations - while delivering the same level of experience to employees and customers alike, remotely." ST