August 17, 2021
Guardian Data Destruction employees frequently refer to themselves as “the undertakers of the IT world.” We know that IT and data storage trends are wagging our tail; as industry reports and surveys are released, we watch carefully to see how our core services: secure data destruction, data center services and secure packing and logistics are affected.
A snapshot of industry trends and predictions from data authorities
It’s no surprise that data and therefore data storage is growing. The astonishment is the rate. Then we extract to understand the impact on secure data destruction and sanitization, the complexity of the networks and data centers as they configure and reconfigure. Don’t forget the impact of COVID on workplace architecture. Some industry forecasts and facts that we are watching as Guardian plans for the next five to ten years of VAR, ITAD, MSP and reseller services:
From Storagenewsletter.com and Trendfocus, Inc.
67 Million HDDs Expected to Ship in 2Q21 With All Global Figures Up
From the Seagate Technology “Rethink Data” Report:
- Over the next two years, enterprise data is projected to increase at a 42.2% annual growth rate.
- On average, organizations now periodically transfer about 36% of data from edge to core. Within only two years, this number will grow to 57%. The volume of data immediately transferred from edge to core will double, from 8% to 16%. This means enterprises will have to manage a lot more data in motion
- Improving data security is the most important factor driving the changes to how organizations manage central storage needs.
- Two thirds of survey respondents report insufficient data security, making data security an essential element of any discussion of efficient data management.
- Survey respondents indicate that approximately 30% of stored data is found in internal data centers, 20% in third-party data centers, 19% in edge data center or remote locations, 22% in cloud repositories, and 9% in other locations.
- Enterprise data stored in 2025 will amount to 9ZB—while 2015 was 0.8ZB.
From the Gartner Top Security and Risk Trends for 2021 Report
- Trend No. 6: Remote working is now just work According to the 2021 Gartner CIO Survey, 64% of employees are now able to work from home, and two-fifths actually are working from home. As a result of COVID-19, what was once only available to executives, senior staff and sales is now widely available, with plans to shift some employees to remote permanently post pandemic. From a security perspective, this requires a total reboot of policies and tools and approved machines to better mitigate the risks.
- Trend No. 7: Breach and attack simulation A new market is emerging to help organizations validate their security posture. Breach and attack simulation (BAS) offers continuous testing and validation of security controls and tests the organization’s posture against external threats, as well as offering specialized assessments and highlighting the risks to high-value assets like confidential data.
- Trend No. 8: Privacy-enhancing computation techniques Privacy-enhancing computation (PEC) techniques are emerging that protect data while it’s being used — as opposed to while it’s at rest or in motion — to enable secure data processing, sharing, cross-border transfers and analytics, even in untrusted environments. This technology is rapidly transforming from academic research to real projects delivering real value, enabling new forms of computing and sharing with reduced risk of data breaches.
From IDC’s Global Datasphere Forecast
- More than 59 zettabytes (ZB) of data will be created, captured, copied, and consumed in the world this year [2020]. Expect 175 zettabytes of data worldwide by 2025
- The amount of data created over the next three years will be more than the data created over the past 30 years, and the world will create more than three times the data over the next five years than it did in the previous five.
- Video surveillance data and privacy and regulatory initiatives/mandates continue to intersect with one another. Finding the correct balance between security, personalization, efficiency, and individual rights to privacy will be one of the great tensions of this decade.
From IDG’s CIO Pandemic Business Impact Survey, 2020 (for Information Technology Decision Makers — ITDMs)
- Technology is realized as a key element in navigating the pandemic – 41% of ITDMs anticipate their tech budgets will increase in the next 12 months (bouncing back from 25% in April), and another 35% expect budgets to be stable.
- CEOs’ top priority for IT continues to be to lead digital business/digital transformation initiatives, and 59% of respondents agree that the effects of the pandemic are accelerating their digital transformation efforts.
- As a result of COVID-19, 64% of ITDMs say that increasing operational efficiency has increased importance as a digital business objective, followed by creating better customer experiences (58%) and improving security (58%).
- In order to become a digital business, ITDMs expect to invest more into big data/analytics, business process management and mobile devices over the next 12 months compared to three months ago.
- COVID-19 continues to change how we work, with the majority of organizations (52%) saying they won’t see employees back in the office in 2020, and organizations are facing the reality that on average only 23% of their workforce needs to be in the office for their business to be fully operational.
The data and security trends takeaway
In a nutshell: how does data storage affect your business model? Understanding future IT equipment and data security needs are essential for creating services for our ITADs, VARs MSPs and resellers to support their success as suppliers and solution experts.
Data destruction, typically the end-of-the-line, end-of-life security precaution, will likely be performed multiple times on the same hard drive or equipment due to extended life cycles, changing hands and secondary markets. And, the sales of so many more hard drives means more data destruction. Solid state drives and nano-technology call for improved and varied methods of secure sanitization. Distributed networks and smart devices will result in broader asset disposition plans to capture data in previously invisible equipment. Reduced personnel (or “lights out”) for data centers means remote and outsourced services will be needed. Updated workplace models will likely produce flexible or reconfigured data storage architectures. Those in turn will increase outsourced, knowledgeable data center services such as decommissioning, equipment migration and remote data erasure.
What we do know
Guardian Data Destruction is evolving as IT and data storage trends evolve. What doesn’t change is our commitment to the security of data handling whether it’s a data center, data destruction or custom services. Our focus on service, process and compliance is the framework that we adhere to as the nation’s data storage and IT equipment needs morph. As our customers embrace the new, we follow with services that continue to securely shred and sanitize the discarded and relocate and migrate the existing.
As your needs or your customers’ needs are changing, what services do you see emerging? Or disappearing? Do you wonder how your company will keep up? Are your service partners working with you to understand your client challenges and how to provide exceptional and profitable solutions?
If you’re looking for a partner to keep you in the forefront, talk to Guardian. Our flexible solutions and experience ensure that data challenges don’t become data headaches.
