IDC MarketScape: U.S. Public Cloud Cold Storage Services 2020 Vendor Assessment
IDC MarketScape U.S. Public Cloud Cold Storage Services Vendor Assessment
IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the icons
IDC Opinion
IDC's survey data consistently shows that enterprise storage growth will expand by upward of 30% annually. This relentless pace of data growth within enterprises, coupled with ongoing macroeconomic headwinds related to COVID-19, drives demand for low-cost enterprise storage solutions. Increasingly, these solutions can be found in the form of public cloud storage services designed with cost as a main factor. These platforms are typically marketed and used for “cold storage” — data that is accessed infrequently and typically associated with secondary storage use cases such as data protection, backup, or archive (as opposed to “primary” use cases such as ERP or CRM).
Cold storage use cases are increasingly valuable because, as companies collect more data, they simply are not able to extract all the business value from it. Enterprises understand that some of their data's value is immediately recognizable, but they also understand that data has the potential to be valuable for future business endeavors or workflows. Instead of discarding this data, cold storage solutions make it increasingly cost effective to save data over the long term and capitalize on undiscovered value in the future. In addition to undiscovered data potential, there are more practical requirements driving long-term data storage, which are typically related to industry compliance and security regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, or CCPA.
It is also important to note that the rise of cold storage services directly correlates to the rise of public cloud IaaS in general. The rapid pace of public cloud storage adoption drives expansion of use cases and the need for more specialized tiers of services like cold storage. Public cloud services providers are uniquely positioned to serve these cold storage use cases. These providers have built a significant infrastructure footprint and developed the economies of scale necessary to deliver storage at extremely low rates (typically price per gigabyte). Furthermore, almost all major public cloud storage providers now offer a “cold storage” service that is separately priced from the rest of their storage portfolio and designed specifically for long-term data retention use cases. The growing prevalence of these services warrants a distinct IDC MarketScape evaluation, which is designed from the perspective of enterprise IT customers, evaluating public cloud cold storage providers using the IDC MarketScape methodology.