The global market for this industry was valued at $6.9 billion in 2016, and is forecasted to grow by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.7% through 2022, when it will be worth an estimated $27.3 billion, according to a new report by BCC Research, ‘Cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) Storage Technologies: Global Markets to 2022’.
Growing demand for increased storage capacity from new services such as the Internet of Things and cloud computing is driving new revenue for suppliers of storage technologies, according to the report published by BCC Research.
North America claims the largest share of the market, with an estimated 2022 value of $11.2 billion. Growth would be fastest in the Asia-Pacific region, which anticipates a CAGR of 19% through 2022.
The Internet of Things is driving demand for new storage systems paced closer to the application, either locally or at the network edge. Cloud services would require centralized systems with massive flexible scalability.
Furthermore, BCC Research sees that companies are increasingly turning to software-defined storage technologies to offer greater degrees of operational efficiency.
“Significantly, the storage increases are occurring regardless of whether or not business revenues or employee headcount remains the same or rises,” said BCC Research report author Michael Sullivan. “Nearly two-thirds of businesses, 63 percent, say their most important storage priority over the next three years is ensuring adequate, efficient storage capacity for the business needs.”
The Move to Cloud and IoT Storage
While the future of cloud and IoT storage is generally quite positive, the move to this infrastructure is sometimes accompanied by challenges and disadvantages, Mr. Sullivan noted. For example, the process of designing and implementing a cloud storage infrastructure that relies on shared storage among clustered servers can be complicated, and early adopters have found it difficult to determine the storage requirements of mission-critical applications after virtualizing their infrastructure.
Finally, cloud and IoT storage is not free from unforeseen failures and outages. Many cloud and IoT storage solutions would rely on off-the-shelf hardware, which can be more prone to failure, stated Sullivan.
