Big data and archival will drive $22 billion in cloud storage spending, says IDC

Information Technology market intelligence company International Data Corporation (IDC) released a report on Friday that forecasts the future growth in corporate spending on cloud-based storage. According to the report, spending on equipment for both public and private cloud storage systems will reach $22.6 billion by 2015.

IDC says we should expect public cloud service providers to increase their spending on storage hardware, software, and professional services over the next five years, and that it should amount to a compound annual growth rate of 23.6%.

Even though IDC said in a study in July that it expected one of every seven IT dollars to be spent on packaged software, servers, and storage offerings for public cloud services, today's report on storage actually predicted a more substantial growth in spending for private cloud installations.

IDC says enterprise spending on private cloud storage will grow by 28.9% between now and 2015.

Still, cloud service providers and enterprises share some common needs in the storage space. IDC cites five requirements that are common between them: more efficient delivery of information and applications to web-based customers; less time and money spent on deploying new IT and compute infrastructure, less investment on internal IT infrastructure associated with unpredictable workloads, lower costs for long-term information archival, and the addition of real-time analysis of "big data."

The overlaps in these areas are pretty big, too. Take Netflix, for example. One would think the company's primary interest would be in establishing a more efficient content delivery over the Web for its instant streaming service. However, Netflix is using "big data" too; it analyzed data from its subscriber base of more than 24 million users on directors, actors, and genres to decide to obtain streaming rights for the show House of Cards earlier this year. Heavy duty information analysis and archival are on the roadmap for many.

"The challenge facing the storage industry will be to balance public cloud service providers' demand for low-cost hardware while boosting demand for advanced software solutions in areas such as object-based storage, automated data tiering, Big Data processing, and advanced archiving services," noted Villars. "Big Data developments will be perhaps the most critical new marketplace for storage solutions providers in the coming decade. Providing a strong portfolio of complete Big Data solutions – hardware, software, and implementation services – will be a high priority to succeed. Similarly, a strong portfolio of active archival storage solutions will be a critical differentiator for private content/archive cloud deployments."

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