Business priorities for 2025: addressing the data and storage crisis
The start of a new year offers companies the opportunity to take stock and evaluate the effectiveness of their data storage. As the world continues to generate record volumes of data, especially with the evolution of AI capabilities, it is more important than ever that organizations ensure they protect themselves against future storage challenges.
With rising data volumes, the industry will face two key challenges by 2025: a looming data shortage crisis and the environmental impact of data centers. However, there are actions organizations can take to overcome these challenges.
The explosion of global data will create a data shortage crisis
The world is creating data in unprecedented volumes, with no signs of slowing down. For reference, a whopping 400 zettabytes will be generated by 2028, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24%.
To put into perspective how large this amount is, consider how many grains of sand there are on all the beaches in the world. In theory, the latest research indicates there are more than seven trillion. Research by the California Institute of Technology equates a single zettabyte of information to exactly this: the amount of sand on the world’s beaches. Now you multiply that by four hundred and we can begin to understand how much data will be generated and processed by the world’s computers in 2028 alone.
As the development of AI tools continues to evolve and grow in scale globally, the value of data will increase, leading us to store more data for longer periods of time. However, the storage installation base is forecast to only have a CAGR of 17%, which is a significantly slower pace than the growth of data being generated. Since it takes an entire year to build a hard drive, the difference in growth rates will then upset the global balance between supply and demand in storage, creating a data shortage crisis.
Looking ahead, organizations will likely become less experimental and more strategic in their use of AI. To address this looming storage crisis, companies will need to start drawing up long-term capacity plans now to ensure sufficient storage supply and fully monetize investments in AI infrastructure.
Storage innovation is imperative to tackle the data center crisis and protect the planet
As the global data boom continues unabated, it will eventually reach the point where data centers will become overwhelmed. According to the UK’s National Grid, energy demand from commercial data is expected to increase sixfold over the next decade. This increase in demand will clearly impact data center capabilities and performance, resulting in resource shortages.
However, there are a number of obstacles to addressing this issue, including financial, regulatory and environmental hurdles. These barriers will increasingly challenge and thwart the need for increased physical data center space and capacity.
According to CBRE, specifically, advances in AI are expected to be a key driver of future data center demand. To manage the increasing need for power density, high-performance computing will require rapid innovation in data center design and technology.
That said, it’s not just innovation in computing that is needed to tackle this data crisis. The implementation of higher areal density hard drives, which increases the amount of data stored on a given unit of storage media, can enable greater data capacity in data centers. Investing in these drives can help data centers avoid the need to build new data storage locations, resulting in significant savings in ownership costs and reducing the future environmental impact of new centers.
Navigating the challenges in 2025
As we look to the year ahead and the potential obstacles that could impact business operations, there are key actions organizations must implement now to stay ahead of the curve.
Businesses must prioritize building robust, long-term capacity plans to minimize future disruption from rapid global data growth. There are also huge benefits to investing in improved AI infrastructure and higher areal density hard drives to effectively address the impact of increased demand on data centers.
As we close out this year and approach the next, and as organizations map out their 2025 business plans, it is critical that they consider implementing effective data storage solutions to benefit their performance, bottom line and the planet .
We’ve put together a list of the largest SSDs and hard drives.
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