This market report, published on August 1, 2022, was written by Julia Palmer and Jeff Vogel, analysts, Gartner, Inc.
Innovation Insight:
Rethink Your Enterprise Storage and Cloud Data Services Strategies for the Edge Awakening
Infrastructure and operations leaders are expanding storage beyond the data center toward the public cloud and the edge. This research highlights edge storage use cases, trends, requirements and technologies that help I&O build its edge data and storage services foundation to prepare for tomorrow.
Key Findings
• The data center is no longer at the center, as data services and storage are expanding toward the cloud and out to edge locations.
• Edge data storage can be differentiated from traditional storage found in data centers by being managed remotely, having robust installation and self-healing capabilities, enabling cloud integration, and being capable of being deployed on portable and flexible hardware.
• As cloud migration continues, the infrastructure and operations team is transforming from the provider of data center infrastructure to the provider of the data services everywhere, focusing on select use cases that will always require storage at the edge. The four most popular use cases at the edge are distributed cloud/data center, data processing at the edge, content collaboration and access, and data ingest and streaming.
• Although edge storage solutions possess common fundamental principles, it is not a single technology, because it needs to be tailored to the specific use cases highlighted in this research.