Cloud Native Storage Market

Cloud Native Storage: An Overview

Cloud native storage is a technology that allows businesses to store and manage data in the cloud. This approach to storage offers several benefits over traditional storage solutions, such as increased scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. In this essay, we will explore the concept of cloud native storage, its advantages, and the various technologies that make it possible.

What is Cloud Native Storage?

Cloud native storage refers to a storage solution that is designed to operate natively within a cloud environment. This means that the storage technology is specifically built to take advantage of the unique characteristics of the cloud, such as its distributed architecture, scalability, and flexibility.

One of the key features of cloud native storage is its ability to scale horizontally. Unlike traditional storage solutions, which often require the addition of more physical hardware to accommodate increased storage needs, cloud native storage can scale seamlessly by adding additional nodes to a distributed storage cluster. This makes it an ideal solution for businesses with rapidly growing data storage requirements.

Advantages of Cloud Native Storage

The adoption of cloud native storage can offer several advantages to businesses. These include:

• Scalability: Cloud native storage is highly scalable, allowing businesses to easily add or remove storage resources as needed. This makes it an ideal solution for businesses with fluctuating storage requirements.
• Flexibility: Cloud native storage can be deployed on a wide range of cloud platforms, making it a flexible solution that can be customized to meet specific business needs.
• Cost-effectiveness: Because cloud native storage is distributed across multiple nodes, it can often be more cost-effective than traditional storage solutions that require the purchase of physical hardware.
• High Availability: Cloud native storage is designed to be highly available, with data replicated across multiple nodes to ensure that it is always accessible.

Technologies Used in Cloud Native Storage

There are several technologies that are commonly used in cloud native storage solutions. These include:

• Object Storage: Object storage is a type of cloud native storage that stores data as objects rather than files. This approach allows for highly scalable storage that can be easily distributed across multiple nodes.
• Distributed File Systems: Distributed file systems allow businesses to store data across multiple servers, enabling highly scalable and fault-tolerant storage.
• Software-Defined Storage: Software-defined storage is a storage technology that uses software to abstract physical storage resources, allowing businesses to create highly scalable and flexible storage solutions.

Cloud native storage is an innovative approach to data storage that offers several advantages over traditional storage solutions. Its ability to scale seamlessly, its flexibility, and its cost-effectiveness make it an ideal solution for businesses with fluctuating storage requirements. By leveraging technologies such as object storage, distributed file systems, and software-defined storage, businesses can build highly scalable and fault-tolerant storage solutions that are optimized for the cloud.

Market Dynamics of Cloud Native Storage Market

Drivers in Cloud Native Storage Market

Market dynamics are constantly changing due to various factors, and one of the drivers of change in the storage market is the automation of application updates. This has led to a need for cloud-native storage, which enables businesses to create automated environments for continuous testing and deployment. In the past, banks used to plan out system updates every six months or so, and notify customers in advance of any anticipated downtime. However, with cloud-native storage, banking and financial apps can be updated every week or even every day without disrupting the service or warning consumers. The technology that automates application provisioning and deployment serves as the foundation for the seamless update process and in-depth testing.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the growth of the cloud-native storage market. The global lockdowns led to a work-from-home scenario, which has resulted in businesses transferring their workloads, storing their data, and establishing business continuity in the cloud. Cloud-native storage offers scalability, flexibility, and reliability at a low cost, making it an attractive option for businesses across regions. As a result, the need for file storage solutions is expected to increase compared to the pre-COVID-19 scenario. The impact of COVID-19 is expected to result in considerably high market growth during the analysis period. According to MarketsandMarkets analysis and data from numerous primary and secondary sources, the market is expected to grow by 2.0 to 3.0 percent in 2020 and 2021, compared to the pre-COVID levels.

Restraints in Cloud Native Storage Market

The public cloud can present issues with latency and network usage when it comes to storing and accessing data. This is due to the loss of end-to-end network control that occurs when data is stored in the public cloud, which can cause disruptions in application performance when combined with high latency. In addition, network problems on the part of the cloud native storage provider can cause storage solutions to fail, leading to significant losses for enterprises. For example, in 2019, network outages caused AWS's EC2 DNS resolutions in the Seoul area to fail, and in June 2022, network congestion in the US caused failures in AWS's EC2 and EBS services. Other causes of latency issues include insufficient internet bandwidth, distant data center locations, and heavy network traffic. While selecting a nearby data center for data storage and high network bandwidth can help to reduce latency, it is important to consider the potential consequences. Some cloud storage companies offer WAN links to help clients alleviate latency problems, and taking preventive measures and utilizing innovative solutions can also minimize the negative impact of latency issues on work processes.

Opportunities in Cloud Native Storage Market

On the other hand, cloud native storage solutions present an opportunity for faster recovery and data backup, as well as increased dependability, flexibility, and availability. Automation in cloud native storage allows for quick data restoration without having to stop the service if something goes wrong. Cloud native storage also includes features like cross-cluster disaster recovery, automatic updating, and volume encryption, which simplify the introduction of block storage to handle information. These capabilities are crucial in all industries and make operational audits and environment monitoring easier. Cloud native storage solutions aid in scalability and the quick execution of data workloads, allowing for the setup of storage boots and backups of stateful applications. By using cloud native storage solutions, organizations can automate the lifetime management of data layer components, making them enterprise-ready while also providing compliance tools and active directory links, which is expected to increase demand for these solutions over the projected period.

Challenges in Cloud Native Storage Market

The complexity associated with cloud native concepts is a significant challenge facing businesses as they consider adoption. While the growth of Kubernetes, containers, and microservices has driven interest in cloud native technology, many companies find it difficult to obtain qualified IT personnel to support their migration to the cloud. In addition, the microservices design can encourage application fragmentation, making it easier to apply changes without a significant impact on the codebase. However, the rate of technological development has made it increasingly challenging for businesses to understand the fundamentals of cloud native technologies like microservices, serverless, or containers without expert assistance. As a result, many enterprises have slowed down their migration to the cloud in an effort to address this issue.

Furthermore, cloud native workflows store data externally, which is a departure from traditional apps where data is typically saved internally. This means that developers must redesign their data access and storage procedures, which can be a significant undertaking during the planning phase. The difficulties in comprehending and implementing cloud native technologies are thus impeding their adoption over the forecast period.

Despite these challenges, there are factors driving market revenue growth for cloud native storage, such as the ease of switching from on-premises to cloud native storage. Cloud native computing is gradually gaining traction in the business world, with applications and infrastructure becoming more efficient, accessible, and easier to maintain thanks to containers, container orchestrators like Kubernetes, storage orchestrators, and other cloud native solutions. Even as businesses implement cloud native technology for other parts of their IT stack, many continue to use on-premises storage solutions. However, cloud native technologies enable the building and running of scalable applications in contemporary, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. This is achieved through the use of containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs.

The cloud native storage market is analyzed geographically and segmented into regions, including North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa, and Latin America. During the forecast period, North America is expected to have the largest market share, as the United States and Canada are rapidly adopting cloud native storage. Top vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, AWS, and Google have a significant presence in the region, which is experiencing significant technological innovations.

However, latency and network outage issues associated with public cloud environments could hinder revenue growth in the market. Network latency is frequently caused by geographical distances between users' requesting devices and cloud servers. Despite affecting both cloud and on-premises networks, there are simple ways to reduce latency. Service interruption is more likely to occur if redundant cloud providers are not used or data is not stored in a private cloud environment. In addition, software updates, mass uploads, user collaboration on projects, or third-party apps can overwrite data, leading to further issues.

The organization size segment of the cloud native storage market is divided into SMEs and large enterprises. It is expected that the large enterprises segment will hold the largest market size during the forecast period. This is due to the higher adoption rate of cloud native storage in large enterprises compared to SMEs. The growth of new technologies, products, services, and solutions has resulted in low adoption costs, thereby generating demand for cloud native storage in both SMEs and large enterprises. Large enterprises, being economically stable, are more likely to invest heavily in advanced technologies.

A recent trend in the market is the increasing popularity of cloud-native design among non-developers. Cloud-native design is not limited to cloud architects and developers, but it also influences how much digital value a business can create. Non-developers are getting more involved in driving cloud-native architecture development by sharing their needs and discussing commercial and cultural prospects.

Another trend in the market is the promotion of a serverless landscape by cloud native storage. Going serverless is a hotly debated issue in cloud architectures. Although it can force businesses into lock-in and reduce programming flexibility, its popularity can be attributed to Kubernetes' container orchestration, which ensures that the required computing resources are always available. Serverless or NoOps is also driven by container technology.

During the forecast period, the private cloud segment is expected to experience a significant and rapid revenue CAGR. This is largely due to the increasing adoption of private cloud and the activities of key market players. Private cloud storage, also known as internal cloud storage, enables major enterprises to manage their internal storage through a dedicated infrastructure in the data center. This provides partners and corporate departments with the same scaling benefits of public cloud storage while addressing security and performance concerns. Consequently, private clouds are quickly becoming the preferred choice for storage purposes among businesses.

The North American market is expected to account for the largest revenue share during the forecast period, driven by the increasing activities of key market players in the region. Change Healthcare, for example, is pioneering Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) and related tools for radiology and cardiology in the healthcare industry's shift from on-premise imaging systems to cloud-native, zero-footprint medical imaging solutions. More than 10% of the imaging data from Change Healthcare's current hospital clients has already been transferred to the cloud, totaling more than 6 petabytes. Stratus Imaging Archive is currently live in 45 hospitals, while Stratus Imaging Analytics is live in 73 organizations.

Key Players in Cloud Native Storage Market

• MICROSOFT
• IBM
• AWS
• GOOGLE
• ALIBABA CLOUD
• HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE
• DELL TECHNOLOGIES
• NETAPP
• PURE STORAGE
• SUSE
• VMWARE
• ORACLE
• HUAWEI
• CITRIX
• TENCENT CLOUD
• SCALITY
• SPLUNK
• LINBIT
• RACKSPACE
• ROBIN.IO
• MAYADATA
• DIAMANTI
• MINIO
• ROOK
• ONDAT
• IONIR
• TRILIO
• UPCLOUD
• ARRIKTO

Recent Developments in Cloud Native Storage Market

The cloud native storage market has seen several recent developments from major players in the industry. In June 2022, Alibaba Cloud introduced a new cloud infrastructure system to power its cloud native data centers. Microsoft Azure announced the general availability of backup for Write Accelerator-enabled disks in May 2022, which is widely used by customers to improve I/O latency of writes against Azure Premium Storage. IBM launched IBM FlashSystem Cyber Vault in February 2022 to help companies detect and recover from ransomware and other cyberattacks. They also announced new FlashSystem storage models based on IBM Spectrum Virtualize to increase cyber resilience and application performance in a hybrid cloud environment.

NetApp launched Astra Data Store in October 2021, which is a Kubernetes-native, shared file, a unified data store for containers and VMs with advanced enterprise data management. In April 2021, Red Hat partnered with Boston University to donate $551.9 million in software subscriptions to support the Mass Open Cloud (MOC) and other open-source projects that make up an open research cloud program. Boston University would benefit from different cloud native and hybrid cloud technologies such as RedHat OpenShift, OpenStack, Virtualization, and Ceph Storage. These recent developments demonstrate the continuous innovations and advancements in the cloud native storage market.

The Cloud Native Storage Market has seen significant developments in recent years. One of the most notable developments is the growing adoption of cloud-native storage solutions across various industries. Cloud-native storage solutions are becoming increasingly popular as they offer benefits such as scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness.

Another recent development in the Cloud Native Storage Market is the increasing demand for hybrid cloud storage solutions. Hybrid cloud storage combines the benefits of both public and private cloud storage solutions, allowing businesses to leverage the strengths of both. This is especially beneficial for businesses with varying workloads and data types that require different storage solutions.

Moreover, advancements in technology have led to the development of new and innovative cloud-native storage solutions. For instance, software-defined storage solutions are gaining traction due to their ability to provide scalable and flexible storage options that can be easily managed from a centralized location.

Additionally, there is a growing trend towards the use of Kubernetes-based storage solutions. Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that allows businesses to manage containerized applications and services more effectively. By integrating Kubernetes with cloud-native storage solutions, businesses can improve application performance and scalability.

Finally, there is an increased focus on security in the Cloud Native Storage Market. As more businesses store sensitive data in the cloud, the need for robust security solutions has become more critical. Cloud-native storage providers are developing new security features such as encryption and access controls to protect their customers' data from cyber threats.

Overall, the Cloud Native Storage Market is evolving rapidly, and businesses that embrace these developments are poised to reap significant benefits in terms of scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness.