Dec 26, 2012

Cloud Storage Mkt. to Reach $46 B by 2018

A recent report, Cloud Storage Market – Worldwide Forecasts & Analysis (2012-2018), published by MarketsandMarkets, found that the cloud storage market is expected to grow from $5.6 billion in 2012 to $46.8 billion by 2018 – an estimated CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 40.2 percent. Of the global cloud storage markets, North America leads with the largest share of 60 percent of the overall market. Cloud storage in North America is estimated to have revenue of $3.4 billion for 2012, and is expected to reach $21.8 billion by 2018 – at a CAGR of 33.8 percent from 2013 to 2018. According to MarketsandMarkets, the rapid growth of cloud-based applications and computing services has had an impact on the storage industry. In addition, cloud storage technologies such as inline data deduplication, inline compression, WAN optimization, cloud-based security solutions and cloud storage gateways are said to be a factor in the growth of the market. With the growth of Big Data, MarketsandMarkets says organizations will “face the challenge of storing the data securely and a low infrastructure cost.” The research and consulting company adds, “This will force enterprises to migrate limitless amount of data and solutions to the virtual environment or cloud storage and without being required to spend too much on infrastructure.” Of the organizations, small and medium-sized businesses are said to be behind the growing cloud storage market. According to the research company, the simplicity of integration of cloud storage into a company’s existing IT infrastructure and security functionality by the gateway tools is what drives the SMBs to adopt cloud storage. Additionally, Howard Lo of ZDNet recently outlined four reasons why small businesses should take advantage of cloud storage. Those four reasons included:

Price – Most often cloud storage is available for companies not only at a low price, but sometimes they’re even fee. Lo states that cloud storage protects organizations against “catastrophic hardware failure” and that even if your “hard drive fails, you can still get to the critical documents that you’ve seamlessly stored online.”
Synchronization – Users can seamlessly move from their office computer to their home computer with little effort. Users can start a document in one place and finish in the other because the file is “automatically synchronized across multiple machines and mobile devices.”
Sharing – Instead of sending multi-megabyte email messages to co-workers, users are able to copy a large document to the cloud storage and with a link anyone can view the document as well.
Collaboration – With the easy accessibility of cloud storage, anyone connected to the network can easily look up stored documents and not only view them, but work on them as well.

“Cloud-based file storage is becoming the expected method for file sharing these days, both on personal devices and in the workplace,” FixYa CEO Yaniv Bensadon told ZDnet. However, according to a recent survey from the support center, while the cloud storage market may be growing exponentially, it does not negate the fact that many users are concerned about the security of the service, file syncing issues, storage limitations and upload/update issues. Nevertheless, FixYa told ZDNet, “For the most part, however, these issues can be solved quickly.”