Data Storage Trends 2018
If one was to define the main trend in data storage for the year of 2018 and, most probably, for quite a few years to come, it would be this: the amount of data people, both individuals and enterprises, store and work with on a daily basis keeps growing exponentially. And it will continue to grow. This simple fact is the mother of all storage-related trends today and this will hardly change. It is going to be the driving force behind all the changes in data-storage market, specifically, in decentralized data storage market, but in fact, it is also the biggest change factor in the entire IT-industry, according to the Interop ITX and InformationWeek 2018 State of Infrastructure study.
It has been agreed with by many on many occasions, that decentralized storage offers much better options for customers with large data arrays in terms of flexibility, safety and anonymity, and this particular market is going through its boom stage, so let’s take a look at some of the interesting trends to look for during this year.
1. Niche solutions. While most cloud-storage projects tend to only offer a few storage plans or differentiate between individual customer and business accounts, usually they still offer the same things in terms of features and services. But with the growth of demand, particular needs of customers are becoming more and more diverse and it becomes hard for data storage providers to support the level of versatility required in order to continue with the high quality of service. It is much easier to branch out and concentrate on excellent quality for a specific target group of customers, instead of trying to offer a uniform solution for everyone. It is also obvious that this particular quality step is much easier to make for decentralized data storage projects, as blockchain technology the majority of them is based upon, is much more flexible in terms of porting and scaling for various features. One of the first to introduce niche service concept for decentralized data storage is Market.space, with its ICO only a few days ahead. The project offers unique features, designed to answer the needs of customers who need to work wtih massive amounts of data, and relies on professional hosting providers.
2. MaaS data management. Management-as-service is garnering more attention when looking into the current trends of decentralized data storage. Various business have already shifted from on-premises data storage, but with increasingly hybrid databases and architectures. It’s predictable that a MaaS extra option for said arrays of data will be in high demand and will allow customers to drop their high-maintenance on-premises data management software. This coincides neatly with the tendency many blockchain-based data storage projects demonstrate: the actual data storage service as a part of a much larger eco-system and infrastructure, such as Sia, Storj and Filecoin.
3. Functional consolidation. Customers and their IT departments will increasingly look for all-in-one solutions, trying to eliminate costs on licensed software, system integration and high-priced system administration and support staff. While offering better features, for instance, better encryption, application and data packaging presents a serious challenge, decentralized data storage providers are looking into employing the newest available technologies, such as machine learning, neural networks and other advanced pattern recognition techniques. As most of the projects are relatively new or even are still in various stages of development and beta-testing, it is much easier for them to implement latest algorithms and subsequently give rise to new storage management processes. Decentralized storage companies will continue to quickly introduce to market machine-learning-based solutions that can learn and make adjustments to settings, optimize workload, promptly identify and fix abnormalities, and broker storage infrastructure and manage large-scale data to ultimately minimize cost.
4. PoS instead of PoW protocol. This is a general trend for many blockchain projects right now, especially after the grand Ethereum switch from the Proof-of-Work announcement. Proof-of-Stake is considered to be more inclusive and ecological, as it does not require energy-consuming calculations to create a block, which constitutes mining. It can cut down the energy costs sufficiently but also allow more people to act as hosting providers.
5. Integration with off-the-shelf software products. It is a given that the more formats and platforms a solution is compatible with, the easier it is for end-users to work with — and it is also much easier to maintain, as using open-source solutions vs licensed software is not always a viable model. In the battle between licensing costs, and money spent on individual development, technical support and maintenance, licensing, surprisingly, often comes on top. But this also fits very well in the general cross-platform and easy-to-port trend, where various decentralized data storage solutions not only try to make access to their services simpler for both users and hosts, but also cross-platform with each other, accepting each others’ native cryptocurrency, for instance, like Market.space does with Storj Labs and Sia Tech.
Updating one’s company’s data storage infrastructure every few years is no longer an option for those who need to keep up with the fast-paced IT industry, so a shift to an off-premises data-storage is almost inevitable these days. But that, too, often doesn’t change fast enough for the growing and diversifying demand. Decentralized data storage solutions, however, look like they are not only able to keep pace, but also shift, restructure and evolve together with the market, offering a variety of options to choose from, depending on exactly what you are looking for.
