surpass expectations, and there will be a huge incentive to store more data for future analysis.
4. Tape archives are finally headed to the graveyard. “De-archiving” will become a frequent theme in 2018.
Until the advent of Cloud Storage 2.0, tape was the most practical way to store large amounts of data for a long time. But it comes with a hefty cost—it’s too slow for anything other than archival storage. The total cost of tape ownership is estimated by big users to be in the neighborhood of 0.5 to 0.7 cents per gigabyte per month. That’s indeed a lot less than Amazon S3 or on-premises hot storage. But it’s higher than Cloud Storage 2.0 prices—Wasabi is 0.39 cents per gigabyte per month.
So, for the first time, it makes sense to migrate those old tape archives to a hot cloud storage service. Also, with the increased use of data analytics, people are finding business value in old archival data. Services like YouTube prove that there is an audience of everything, no matter how specialized or obscure.
Video is by far the biggest data type on the Internet by volume. Moving these assets back into hot storage allows them to be marketed through all the new streaming channels that are available today. In 2018, the media and entertainment industry will embrace “de-archiving” and create new revenue streams from old content.
5. The danger of data loss unfortunately persists, but immutability mitigates the risks.
2017 was the year of ransomware. People are starting to realize that the real risk to their data is not equipment failure, but things like accidental deletions, sabotage, and software bugs. Cloud storage has become so reliable that data loss due to things like disk failures almost never occurs, especially with many vendors introducing the option of immutability.
Data stored in immutable buckets cannot be erased, modified, or overwritten—not by ransomware, not by saboteurs, and not even by system administrators. Immutability will become a standard feature of Cloud Storage 2.0 vendors and help prevent data breaches come 2018.
[Editor’s note: This is part of a series of posts sharing thoughts from technology leaders about 2017 trends and 2018 forecasts.]
