As a new year starts, let’s kick it off by looking at some ongoing data trends and estimating what we can expect going forward:
It’s instructive to begin with a look at overall data trends, as those will largely inform the environment archiving and backup providers will be working in:
According to the International Data Corporation, we can expect Cloud growth to continue growing; shared cloud infrastructure spending is expected to grow 57.9% from year to year with dedicated cloud infrastructure spending growth projected at 20.4%.
IDC’s service provider category includes cloud service providers, digital service providers, communications service providers, hyperscalers, and managed service providers. In 2024, service providers as a group spent $41.8 billion on compute and storage infrastructure, up 64.2% from the prior year.
With these trends in mind, we can expect that archiving and backup will continue to grow in concert with the overall data storage environment; investment into the Cloud and into storage necessarily includes investment into systems for governing that storage.
This dovetails well with both expectations and with previous trends, which have been discussed on this blog throughout the year. We’ve seen increasing digitalization driving data growth across the board, with the greater data volumes in turn driving investment into associated fields including the Cloud (generally for reasons of saving on costs) and into archiving and long-term storage.
Continued movement on the regulatory front
Likewise continuing trends from the last two years, there is further movement on the regulatory front in the EU especially, but more broadly worldwide. The EU Data Act is set to start applying on the 20th of September in EU countries, for instance.
Overseas, a development to watch is the American Privacy Rights Act of 2024. While just a draft legislation for now, if it passes the APRA would establish an American equivalent to Europe’s GDPR. This would in a turn both simplify matters for enterprises doing business in the USA by helping somewhat to flatten the current patchwork of disparate state-level regulations, but also in some cases enforce a higher standard.
Regulations and the necessity for regulatory compliance has over the past years been a major driver of archive development and movement on the market; not only is having an archive capable of complying with the newest regulations a key aspect of enterprise procurement decisions, it’s also a factor in churn on the archive provider market as older solutions cease being adequate due to not meeting newer requirements. We will continue to watch the regulatory field and bring you key updates, but we expect it to grow more complex as nations strive to address perceived shortcomings.
Cybersecurity still a going concern
As could be expected, the cybersecurity field will continue to see rapid development. On the positive side, we’ve seen significantly greater international cooperation in 2024 and this trend is set to continue into the current year.
On the other hand, the crackdown will have some as-yet uncertain knock-on effects. Anticipated regulatory changes will heighten pressure on CISOs, who will have to deal with stricter regulations than ever before and will be increasingly “on the hook” for things going wrong. While it’s not certain what direction this will push the market, this is likely to be one of the major motive forces for cybersecurity development in 2025.
An unfortunate continuing trend is not only increasing numbers of cyberattacks (which have continued to escalate from 2023 to 2024 and will keep climbing into 2025), but also an increasing complexity. 2024 saw AI-enabled spearphishing attempts on larger enterprises and continual ransomware attacks. We expect this growing complexity of attacks to continue, complimenting the increased volume with more individually dangerous intrusion attempts leveraging new technological possibilities such as generative AI.
As all of these trends continue to develop, TECH-ARROW will refine our predictions as well as continue to tailor our approach and our software to best reflect the state of the market and address new needs and requirements as they develop. For now, we wish you a successful start to the new year and all the best going forward.
Your Data In Your Hands – With TECH-ARROW
