Storage and backup investment plans for 2024 show a significant bias towards averting risk and building resilience. At the same time, storage spending plans lean towards the cloud, but with very robust on-premise storage spending plans also present.
Those are the findings of the Technology spending intentions survey from TechTarget and ESG, which questioned 1,432 technology decision-makers worldwide over three key areas:
- Most important broad technology initiatives in 2024.
- How technology budgets will be spent.
- Technology investment plans by technology for 2024.
When asked about storage and data protection technologies that organisations plan to invest in over the next 12 months, the overwhelming majority of responses indicate plans of arguably a “defensive” nature. Therefore, at number one, we find data governance, risk and compliance, with disaster recovery, cyber resilience and business continuity next. Joint-fourth is ransomware protection. Only in sixth place do we see something that’s not explicitly about protection of data or risk, namely public cloud file storage as a key investment.
Next up, we were back on defence, with data management of cloud and unstructured data, backup for cloud data, and backup hardware and software.
Public cloud object storage comes last in the list of 10 investment priorities.
When these responses were broken down between enterprise and mid-market decision-makers, storage-as-a-service also creeps into the top 10 priorities.
Cloud storage leads investment plans, but on-site also significant
Public cloud storage (file and object) continues to be the most likely storage investment. But on-premise investments are still significant, especially in the context of organisations reevaluating whether the cloud is the right place to store data and applications.
As mentioned above, when it comes to investment in storage capacity, cloud storage is a prominent priority, with file (31% of those questioned) and object (24%) the most significant storage investments planned worldwide.
Storage as a service came in third in the list of investment priorities, with planned spend in 2024 by 23% of respondents.
Cloud block storage was also cited by 16% of those asked, but the other seven in a list of 11 storage technology areas are unambiguously on-premise.
Internal server storage tops the list of investment priorities here (19%), followed by hyper-converged infrastructure (16%), software-defined storage (15%) and on-premise SAN capacity – Ethernet (15%) and Fibre Channel (12%). Behind those are flash storage (12%) and on-premise direct attached storage (10%).
The survey also broke down responses between North America, EMEA and Asia-Pacific. Where these vary significantly includes public cloud file and object storage in North America, which lags behind the worldwide average (26% and 19%), while it leads in cloud block storage plans by a long way (29% versus 16%).
Meanwhile, flash storage plans are significantly more prevalent in North America (16%) and APAC (14%) than in EMEA (9%).
Building resilience a key priority in data protection
In data protection generally, there’s a big bias towards building resilience and averting risk. Meanwhile, the nuts and bolts of that resilience, in the shape of backup – including of cloud data such as containers – takes up a significant portion of planned spend in 2024.
Priorities around data protection are topped by disaster recovery (37%), with the closely allied business continuity in third place (32%).
All of the top five priorities centre on resilience and include “data governance, risk and compliance” in joint top (37%), and cyber resilience services (33%).
Backup figures heavily as a spending priority, with backup for cloud data such as VMs and containers the most prominent (25%), backup hardware and software generally (24%), and backup-as-a-service (18%), endpoint backup (17%), and SaaS application data backup also on 17%.
In the middle of all of the above is data management – for example, for cloud and unstructured data – of which 27% said it would be an investment priority in 2024.
Archiving is among investment plans for 17% of those questioned.
Meanwhile, tape’s not dead, but it’s not a huge priority for many (3%), and is down on last year’s 6%.