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The Asia Pacific market is expected to lead the world in terms of enterprise storage market revenue growth within the next four years, with the segment anticipated to rake in an estimated US$55.6 billion in 2024.
While revenue growth forecasts for the enterprise storage market as a whole have been hit by the effects of COVID-19, the segment has the potential to remain relatively buoyant, especially in the APAC region, according to industry analyst firm Global Data.
“APAC will lead the enterprise storage market revenue growth by 2024, followed by North America and Europe,” Global Data senior technology analyst Shamim Khan said. “However, the growth might be affected as enterprises are preferring cloud storage options to ensure business continuity and remote data accessibility options.
“Despite this, the traditional approach of screening, surveying, and storing the data, the availability of cost-effective skilled workforce and secure on-premises storage infrastructure will result in significant revenue from the traditional storage offerings over the next five years,” she added.
Overall, APAC storage market revenue is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.5 per cent during 2019-2024, notably less than Global Data’s previous forecast of 14.6 per cent before the COVID-19 outbreak, to reach US$55.6 billion in 2024.
However, despite the estimated decline in storage revenue as compared to initial estimates, data volume continues to grow owing to factors such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and connected devices ecosystem adoption, smart city initiatives by governments and increased proliferation of mobile devices.
As a result, Global Data suggests, enterprises will further require storage infrastructure to store and process the data for their current as well as potential future requirements.
“The requirement of the enterprises to store structured as well as unstructured data to derive insights for enhancing consumer offerings, enhance business capabilities and replicate the data stored on multiple platforms will result in the growth of enterprise storage revenue,” Khan said.
Global Data’s analysis suggests that all-flash and hybrid arrays will witness the highest growth (CAGR) of 10.7 per cent during the forecast period and is estimated to have a significant portion of the overall storage revenue by 2024 — roughly 43 per cent, in fact.
Low maintenance requirements, cost-effectiveness and reliability are some of the key features that will result in the sustained demand for all-flash and hybrid arrays in the APAC region, according to the analyst firm.
At the same time, software-defined storage platforms and applications revenue is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 7.7 per cent during the period in question, as they offer better flexibility for storage space allocation for various devices and computation requirements.
Despite the growing adoption of software-defined storage platforms, revenue from network-attached storage (NAS) is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 3.1 per cent during the five-year period, Global Data said, with lower cost, high efficiency and scalability some of the key drivers for a high adoption of NAS offerings.
