Off-Premises Storage Growing at 20-30% Over Next 2 Years – Evaluator Group

New research (Hybrid Cloud Storage for the Enterprise Research Study, 80 pages and figures, $9,500) from Evaluator Group, Inc. examines the progression and use of hybrid cloud storage and how the enterprise is leveraging technology on and off-premises.

“Storage systems spending is forecasted to grow 9.8% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2018 and we expect, when IDC releases first quarter market share, Dell EMC’s storage business will outperform the market and gain share,” said Matt Eastwood, SVP, enterprise, datacenter, cloud infrastructure and developer research groups, IDC.

Just as storage is foundational to on-site computing, the same is true for public cloud computing. Thus, in the second year of detailed reporting on hybrid cloud, Evaluator Group breaks down the data aspect into eight use cases for hybrid cloud storage architectures. The study examines the adoption and progression of enterprise IT organizations as they expand their use both on and off-premises.

“The research makes it clear, off-premises storage is growing at the rate of 20-30% over the next two years, depending on the use case,” stated Camberley Bates, MD and analyst, Evaluator Group. “However, 47% of IT personnel remained uncertain with regard to where the greater%age of storage spending will fall over the long run-data center or public cloud. As they embrace public cloud, they continue to experience barriers to adoption such as network bandwidth and interoperability.”

“When we queried on costs, we found public cloud storage cost more for 6 out of the 8 use cases,” said John Webster, senior analyst, Evaluator Group. “But we also found IT end user perspectives to cost fell into two camps. Either they believed ‘cloud storage costs more, but it’s worth it’ or ‘cloud storage actually costs less,’ with only one of the interviewees holding an opposing view.”

The report shows while public cloud storage requires its own expertise, the fundamentals still apply. IT uses public cloud advanced data services such as snapshots, replication, encryption and other services at varying degrees depending on the use case. This brings opportunity for IT architects to be advisors and managers of public cloud environments as well as for systems vendors seeking to provide the tools and expertise to effectively implement the workloads on and off-premises.

Other top findings included:
1. AWS is the dominant provider, though when broken down by use case, the CSP varies
2. DR is the leading use case for the enterprise, though the second use case varies widely by enterprise
3. The bulk of the storage spending remains on-premises, though users are clearly uncertain where that will stand by 2020
4. Increasingly formal cloud teams make decisions on cloud storage, while only 20% of the time is central IT involved with the decisions.