The authors, Phil Goodwin, Research VP, Infrastructure Software Platforms, Worldwide Infrastructure Research, and Greg Macatee, Senior Research Analyst, Infrastructure Software Platforms, Worldwide Infrastructure Research, IDC, tell us that many organizations are now storing more than a petabyte of data. They state that “the total data being stored by organizations worldwide is 7.2ZB in 2024, growing to 15.1ZB by 2027.” They note that much of the data is stored on tape today, about 1.6ZB, and is expected to grow to 3ZB by 2027.

TRAINING AI WHILE PROTECTING DATA FROM RANSOMWARE

The report states, “New data coming into an organization is mostly unstructured. It may be stored either on premises or in the cloud, frequently on an S3-compatible object storage.” The authors point out that there is an emphasis on leveraging AI and that “harnessing large quantities of corporate data for analytics and AI model training improves model accuracy and achieves deeper insights,” which underscores the massive amounts of data that will need to be stored and securely protected from cyber intrusion like ransomware.

The paper refers to an IDC December 2023 Future Enterprise and Resiliency Spending Survey, Wave 11, which found that “64% of organizations had to respond to ransomware at least once in the past 12 months. Having storage capable of assuring absolute data survivability is foundational to cyber-recovery.” The authors explain that a tier of storage is needed that can:

• Deal with massive quantities of data and allow that data to be managed effectively.
• Provide access to data with acceptable latency for data-intensive workloads.
• Scale easily to meet relentless data growth.
• Be highly secure with assured data survival due to any data loss event, including cyberattacks.
• Provide the lowest possible total cost of ownership (TCO) with reliability measured in decades.

ACCESS TO DATA IS KEY – S3, OBJECT STORAGE AND TYPE

Access to data is a key to using it for its inherent value. The authors explain that “LTO tape systems can support access to data on tape using the S3 access APIs. Using the S3 interface, tape is ideally suited to providing nearline access to data and either supplementing or replacing object storage. Having integrated object and cold-tier storage simplifies data management for organizations while making data more accessible.” The paper explains that “newer tape solutions offering S3- compatible access methods can allow organizations to combine object storage and tape into a single logical storage pool.” It’s important to note, “Using nearline tape systems, these large volumes of data can be available for use and kept on systems with very low environmental requirements, including power, cooling, and floor space.” In addition to these benefits, IDC highlights that LTO tape systems can also provide:

• Hardware encryption: Data on tape can be encrypted using the LTO hardware encryption capabilities.
• Immutability: Cartridges can also be made immutable using write once, read many settings to ensure that data cannot be changed or deleted.
• Air gap: Cartridges can also be physically removed from a tape library and stored in a secure location that offers true physical separation that (cyber) intruders cannot breach.