The start of a new year presents an opportunity for businesses to take stock and evaluate the effectiveness of their data storage. As the world continues to generate record volumes of data, particularly through the evolution of AI capabilities, it’s more important than ever that organization ensure they safeguard against future storage challenges.
With surging data volumes, industry is set to face two key challenges in 2025: an impending data shortage crisis, and the environmental impact of data centers. However, there are actions organizations can take to navigate these challenges.
The explosion of global data will cause a data shortage crisis
The world is creating data at unprecedented volumes, with no signs of slowing down anytime soon. For reference, in 2028, as many as 400 zettabytes will be generated, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24%.
To put into perspective how large this quantity is, consider how many grains of sand there are on all the world’s beaches – in theory, the latest research indicates there are over seven sextillion. Research by the California Institute of Technology equates one single zettabyte of information to exactly this, the amount of sand across the world’s beaches. Now times that by four hundred and we can begin to understand just how much data that will be generated and processed by the world’s computers in 2028 alone.
With the development of AI tools continuing to mature and grow in scale globally, the value of data will increase, which will lead us towards storing more data, for longer periods of time. However, the storage install base is forecasted to have only a 17% CAGR, which is a significantly slower pace than the growth of data being generated. As it takes a whole year to build a hard drive, the disparity in growth rates will subsequently disrupt the global storage supply and demand equilibrium, causing a data shortage crisis.
Looking ahead, organizations will likely become less experimental and more strategic in their use of AI. Navigating this looming storage crisis will require businesses to start building long-term capacity plans now, to ensure adequate storage supply, and fully monetize investments in AI infrastructure.
Storage innovation is imperative to tackling the data center crunch and protecting 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, power demand from commercial data is expected to increase six-fold within the next 10 years along. This increase in demand will clearly impact the capabilities and performance of data centers, resulting in a crunch in resource.
However, there are a number of barriers to tackling this issue, including financial, regulatory and environmental hurdles. These barriers will increasingly challenge and oppose the need for greater, physical data center space, and capacity.
According to CBRE, AI advancements are specifically projected to be a significant driving factor for future data center demand. To manage the rising need for power density, high-performance computing will require rapid innovation in data center design and technology.
That being said, it’s not just innovation in computing that is needed to help address this data crunch. The implementation of higher area density hard drives, which expand 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 for building new data storage sites, resulting in significant TCO savings and reducing the future environmental impacts of new centers.
Navigating the challenges in 2025
As we look towards the year ahead and the potential obstacles that may affect business operations, there are key actions that organizations should implement now to be ahead of the curve.
Businesses should prioritize building robust long-term capacity plans, to minimize the future disruption caused by rapid global data growth. There are also huge benefits in investing in improved AI infrastructure and higher areal density hard drives, to effectively tackle the impact of increased demand on data centers.
As we end this year and approach the next, and as organizations map out their 2025 business plans, it’s critical they factor in implementing effective data storage solutions for the good of their performance, bottom line and the planet.
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