2026 Predictions Part 2: The Rise of Hybrid, Tiered, and Tape-Enabled Active Archives
The explosive growth of unstructured data, combined with rising infrastructure and energy costs, is forcing organizations to rethink how they store and manage data at scale. As we enter 2026, active archives are increasingly being built on hybrid, tiered architectures that combine cloud, object storage, and modern tape technologies.
Rather than a step backward, this evolution reflects a smarter, more sustainable approach to long-term data management. Here’s what members of the Active Archive had to say:
Tape for long-term storage.
Driven by exponential data growth and the need for lower-cost, energy-efficient, long-term storage, tape is poised to become a cornerstone of active archival tiers within hybrid storage architectures. – Marc Steinhilber, CEO, BDT Media Automation GmbH
Managing data growth is becoming more than just a challenge, with IT teams barely able to keep up with demands for performance storage.
In the AI data-driven world of 2026 and beyond, IT teams will be compelled to strategically leverage active archiving. With intelligent data management, an active archive solution allows automated movement of data based on user-defined policy, moving data from expensive, energy-intensive performance storage to eco-friendly, economy storage tiers, such as today’s modern automated tape systems. This approach frees up overwhelmed performance storage tiers while maintaining easy access to always-online active archive content. – Rich Gadomski, Director Channel Sales and New Business Development, FUJIFILM North America Corp., Data Storage Solutions
Modern object storage will expand to include long-term tape solutions.
The explosion of Generative AI and increased demand for unstructured data retention are exceeding modern IT budget growth. Standardized object storage interfaces make it easy to move data, but object storage was designed as a single-tier utilizing hard disk drives. Tiering will become a standard requirement for active data object storage vendors. Modern object storage solutions will expand support to include tape and other long-term storage mediums as an object storage deep archive target, at a fraction of the cost of cloud archives. Cloud will continue to be part of the hybrid data protection strategy. The result will be lowered costs for organizations storing Petabytes of data. – Mark Hill, Business Line Executive, Data Retention Infrastructure, IBM
The rise of geo-distributed active archives based on S3-to-tape technology.
By 2026, the deployment of geo-distributed active archives leveraging modern tape libraries is expected to accelerate across enterprises and data center environments. This development is driven by sustained data growth, rising energy and storage costs, and growing demands for data resilience and regulatory compliance.
Advancements in tape system integration, such as S3 object storage compatibility, metadata-driven access, and seamless connection to cloud workflows, are transforming S3-to-Tape systems into geo-aware active archives. These systems enable cost-efficient, sustainable, and cyber-resilient data preservation across multiple geographic locations.
Consequently, S3-to-Tape solutions will play a pivotal role in shaping long-term, distributed data management architectures. – Thomas Thalmann, CEO, PoINT Software & Systems GmbH
Hybrid deployments for large active archives.
The use of hybrid configurations that combine on-premises storage and cloud will continue to grow. This approach is especially the case for large active media archives where on-premises storage provides high performance and cost-effectiveness, and, when combined with cloud object storage, the solution provides a high level of data protection. – Phil Storey, CEO, XenData
In 2026, the most successful active archives will not be purely cloud-based or purely on-premises. They will be intelligently tiered, hybrid by design, and tape-enabled, delivering scale, sustainability, and accessibility without compromise.
