2024 Data Storage and Active Archive Trends – Part III
Members of the Active Archive Alliance shared their 2024 predictions for data storage and active archives. In Part III, we look at the escalating threat of cyberattacks, data repatriation, backup tape demand, LTO and cloud vs. on-premises.
Active Archives Embrace LTO Tape, Redefining Sustainable Frozen Data Storage
In 2024, the data storage landscape will undergo a transformative shift, with active archive solutions gaining even more prominence. Leveraging the power of LTO Tape technology for frozen data, organizations will adopt a tiered storage approach, seamlessly balancing performance, and cost-efficiency. Active archives will continue to integrate Tape libraries as a reliable and cost-effective solution for long-term preservation of infrequently accessed data, ensuring durability and data integrity. This fusion of active archive and LTO Tape will not only address the escalating storage demands but also enhance data longevity, making it a sustainable choice for businesses. As data becomes an ever more asset, the 2024 landscape will witness a strategic alignment between high-performance storage and archival technologies. Tape technology enhances sustainability in data storage with its energy-efficient and durable design, providing a reliable, eco-friendly solution for long-term data preservation. – Natalie Kremer, Global Product and Channel Marketing Manager, Overland-Tandberg.
The Escalating Threat of Cyberattacks on Critical Infrastructure will Necessitate a Rethinking of Ransomware Protection Strategies for Cities and States in 2024
Ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure have been on the rise, targeting sectors like energy, healthcare, and transportation. The interconnected nature of city infrastructures makes them a particularly vulnerable target as demonstrated by the recent attack on the city of Dallas, TX. That attack affected multiple servers including those for the police, water, 311, courts, secretary’s office, and code compliance. In 2024, continued attacks on critical infrastructure will drive cities and states to rearchitect their approach to ransomware protection, placing equal emphasis on both prevention and recovery plans, and focusing on active archives to facilitate that. The trend will be towards immutable storage which can’t be encrypted, greater focus on air-gapped storage which can’t be reached by electronic viruses, practicing recovery events, and maintaining an accessible and current archive for all data. The accessibility offered by active archive, such as S3 interfaces and object storage on all mediums, make an “active” archive possible and indispensable to such an approach. – Tony Mendoza, Vice President of IT, Spectra Logic.
Data Repatriation Will Cause a Shift in Active Archive Strategy
We will continue seeing data sets being “repatriated” from the cloud for various reasons. Organizations need to balance the need to efficiently manage and store data cost-effectively with the ability to keep it accessible and useful. This will force a change in thinking about data lifecycle management and active archive strategy. Will there be different approaches to local data vs. data in the cloud? How will AI be used to make the management of data more efficient? Will those tools even be available? Will this trend solve problems or create more? – Paul Luppino, Director, Global Digital Solutions Data Management, Iron Mountain.
2024 Predicts Massive Leaps in LTO Capacity and Backup Tape Demand for Active Archives
While the steady increase of the cloud has led some to argue tapes will fade into obsolescence, we expect tape to remain indispensable for long-term data archiving throughout 2024 and beyond. Growth in LTO capacity, cost effective approach and retrieval speeds, combined with tape’s offline protection against ransomware, portability across sites, and scale, provides the foundation for even more data retention need. More organizations will embrace a multi-tier data storage strategy with cost-efficient tape libraries as their archive tier in highly automated tape-NAS-cloud pipelines. One can predict LTO-9 and newer formats will see continued growth and demand, especially among regulated industries where data accessibility for e-discovery and regulatory demands across decades remains business-critical. Backup tape retains unparalleled advantages that no rival medium can match. 2024 will see prudent IT decision makers continue investing in this future-proof cold data storehouse and the rich metadata tape provides. – Dean Felicetti, Director of Data Risk and Remediation, S2|DATA.
Active Archives in the Cloud or On-Premises?
Public cloud object storage offers a convenient way to create an active archive. It is also a cost-effective solution for small data volumes. But as the size of a cloud archive grows, the costs increase approximately linearly. This is unlike on-premises archives based on data tape libraries which have a lower cost per TB, the larger the archive. As soon as an active archive grows to more than a few hundred TBs, an LTO archive becomes dramatically more cost effective. In 2023 we saw many customers move their content from the cloud to an on-premises archive that combines a data tape library, disk cache and management software. And for secure remote access, an S3 interface has been easily added, creating a private cloud. We expect these trends to continue in 2024. Larger active archives will continue to migrate from cloud to on-premises systems due to increasing cloud storage costs. – Philip Storey, CEO, XenData.
