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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:

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 thats 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.

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%).

In data protection generally, theres 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, tapes not dead, but its not a huge priority for many (3%), and is down on last years 6%.

Originally posted here:
Storage and backup spend in 2024 targets risk and resilience - ComputerWeekly.com