Predicting future changes in the world of technology can be a tricky endeavour. New products and innovations are revealed so rapidly that even experts may be caught unprepared. Even so, that doesn't mean looking into the future is without merit as it helps businesses and industries plan ahead. One of the most important aspects of any organization’s operations is the use of storage, particularly as more of the world becomes driven by data. Current ways of tackling storage challenges are already proving inadequate, necessitating new technologies and strategies for companies both large and small. Though no prediction is guaranteed to happen with 100% accuracy, here are several possibilities for what the future holds for data storage based off of current trends and recent technological developments.
Growth of the Public Cloud
There’s no denying that the public cloud has exploded in just the past few years. Major cloud providers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Dropbox have been instrumental in showing many companies and individual users the benefits of using cloud storage. But many organizations have been hesitant to use the cloud, mainly due to data security and ownership worries. Cloud providers are working to answer these concerns, which will likely lead to even more growth for the public cloud among businesses. Experts are even predicting as much as 44% growth annually for the number of workloads in the public cloud for the rest of the decade. If the trend holds, it will show that more enterprises are willing to put more trust in cloud vendors when it comes to handling valuable data.
Use of Multi-Cloud Storage
Most companies choose to go with one cloud provider when moving to the cloud, but each vendor comes with strengths and drawbacks. Some tech companies are working to help customers get the most out of each one by developing programs wherein users can take advantage of multiple cloud providers at once. This allows businesses to access their cloud-stored data from all these different vendors much more easily without having to worry about performance issues.
More Flash Storage
For years, the main debate regarding storage seemed to center on flash storage vs. hard drive, with hard disk drives being the more popular option since they were more established and cheaper to manufacture. Flash storage is faster, more durable, and requires less power to cool, but its price tag and somewhat limited capacity prevented many companies from fully taking advantage of it. As usually happens with technologies, that price tag is steadily declining and capacity is increasing, giving businesses more access to flash storage. Because of this, expect more organizations to adopt flash storage as a way to store data that needs to be quickly and easily accessed. Hard disk drives likely won’t go away and will probably be more widely used for years to come, but flash will definitely be well on its way to catching up over the next decade.
Storage in Liquid Form
Going beyond the current trends, the future will likely hold exciting new developments and technological breakthroughs. Some of those discoveries will possibly occur with new forms of storage. Of particular interest is what is often referred to as liquid-state storage. The technology uses vanadium dioxide which can be given positive or negative charges. This acts as a sort of binary code, allowing the substance to store data as an ionic liquid-based transistor. Another way liquid might be used in a storage method is with a liquid hard drive. This innovation is currently being worked on at the University of Michigan and features liquid that contains nanoparticle clusters. The nanoparticles also act in a binary fashion, storing data at the molecular level. Researchers have been able to store a whole terabyte of data in just one tablespoon of the substance. The implications are particularly fascinating, with massive amounts of data that could potentially be stored in a very small physical space.
The future of data storage holds a lot of promise, with many different options for businesses and individuals to choose from. Storage will continue to get cheaper for larger amounts, which will help organizations deal with all the big data being generated in the world. Further developments will likely lead to incredible new inventions. In short, it is highly probable that the data storage we’ll see in the future will be quite different than what we experience today.