2012 Prediction: Symform
2012 Will Mark the Beginning of a “Cloud Storage Revolution”
Symform predicts that accelerating amounts of data, combined with the high cost of traditional offsite storage, will serve as a catalyst for revolutionary reform. With IDC predicting 50 times data growth by 2020 and the gap between costs of local versus offsite storage continuing to widen, businesses must identify dramatically better means for how this data can be managed, retained, stored, shared, virtualized and distributed. The spread will continue to widen between per GB costs of a local storage device versus what it costs per GB to store and backup that data in the Cloud. With 4TB drives on the horizon under $100, businesses will balk at paying $1,000 per month to backup a $100 local drive. Businesses will also look to solve a fundamental storage issue of deploying additional onsite storage capacity at record rates when the average local disc is only 25-35% utilized over the life of the drive. The free space on local storage devices globally is orders of magnitudes larger than the capacity of all current data centers combined, and businesses will realize the economics does not make sense.
The “Green” Data Center for Cloud Computing Will Be Debunked
While the cloud is heralded as “green,” data center sprawl is creeping in as companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon build out massive global infrastructures to power their cloud-based services. Recent reports show Google continuously exerts 250 million watts of energy from the servers behind its cloud. That is enough to power all of Salt Lake City or any other city with approximately 200,000 households. Today, data centers account for 14 percent of all carbon emissions, and the EPA estimates that data centers and servers account for two percent of power in the U.S. By 2020, Symform predicts that if left unchecked, more than 25 percent of the nation’s power will be required to power data centers, unless businesses can identify new means for storing data without building additional data centers.
IT Solution Providers Will Focus on Augmenting Current Service Portfolios with Innovative Cloud Offerings
According to CompTIA’s 2nd Annual Trends in Cloud Computing study, 40 percent of channel companies both sell and use cloud offerings, compared with just 15 percent of companies last year. As we dive into 2012, Symform predicts that pace will accelerate. In an ongoing effort to embrace the cloud, IT services providers will look to innovative cloud offerings to differentiate themselves from the competition, add improved and more cost-effective offerings to their customers, and increase their gross margins. Emerging cloud storage options, in particular, offer an attractive alternative to traditional onsite storage, which has become a common service add-on for many solution providers.
2012 Will Be a Wake-up Call for SMBs to Reassess Current Storage and Backup Practices
SMBs are among the most vulnerable victims of cloud outages, with some never fully recovering after experiencing a major data loss. To make matters worse, research reveals that 70 percent of SMBs do not store data off-site, only locally, and that at least 15 percent of SMBs have no data backup or business continuity plans whatsoever. Faced with a dizzying array of on-premise and “prosumer” cloud storage options like iCloud and Dropbox, Symform predicts that SMBs will re-evaluate their buying criteria in favor of more secure, scalable, enterprise-class storage and backup solutions.
