4 Ways Hybrid Cloud Adoption Influences SDS

This report was written by Todd Dorsey, analyst, DCIG LLC, and published on January 14, 2021.

4 Ways Hybrid Cloud Adoption Influences SDS

SDS and Hybrid Cloud Market Growth
SDS (SDS) continues increasing enterprise adoption for storage management. Concurrently, organizations are rapidly adopting hybrid cloud. 

The hybrid cloud market projects to grow 20% incrementally by $67.62 billion through 2024. The SDS market, trending at a compound growth rate of 27%, expects to grow $42.79 billion through this same time.

Certainly, these two offerings are linked. SDS has moved beyond early data center deployments and into cloud deployments and data targets. This linkage with cloud platforms is shaping the features and characteristics of SDS products. 

Here are 4 ways that hybrid cloud adoption influences SDS offerings:
1. Deployment flexibility. Enterprises deploy SDS solutions at the edge, in data-centers, and within cloud platforms.   Recognizing different deployment environments better suit some purposes over others, enterprises move data to where workloads best reside. Thus, organizations want SDS solutions with flexibility and adaptability to meet the unique needs of these diverse workloads.
2. Cloud data snapshotting. More than in the past, enterprises are snapshotting to the cloud. Organizations may use that data to recover applications on-premise, recover applications in the cloud, or extract value from that data by running cloud-based processes vs. it. Businesses gain value from snapshotting to the cloud through enhanced data protection and the opportunity to create new value from the data.
3. Automation and predictive analytics. Data gen, regardless of industry, continues to climb. As data’s value diminishes with age, organizations require automation tools with SDS processes that speed processes. For example, tools to facilitate intelligence of which data should be moved to the cloud and automation features such as auto-tiering to perform these tasks. Organizations need this same storage intelligence, automation, and analytics in the cloud as on-premises.  Enhanced through AI and ML, SDS becomes a differentiator as companies look to save time and money through insights, recommendations, and automation features.
4. Licensing and pricing. Organizations are looking for flexibility in their agreements. As contrasted with a traditional contract for an on-premise storage array and then a new agreement if the data is in the cloud, companies want 100 terabytes of storage wherever it lives through their SDS solution. In response, solution providers are adapting their licensing and pricing models to accommodate hybrid-cloud architectures. For example, licensing a given capacity, for a given period of time, for deployment however or wherever the organization prefers.