Our Top 5 (Plus One!) Predictions for 2019

2019 is upon us so, naturally, it’s time to make some predictions.

1. Cloud Standards – De Facto or Vendor Neutral?

The Amazon S3 API will become accepted as the de facto standard interface for cloud object storage.  Hundreds of software products, ranging from backup software like Commvault to file acceleration software like FileCatalyst, already talk the S3 API.

On the storage side, vendors will all emulate the S3 API making it easy for customers to switch storage vendors.

The Amazon Access and Identity Management (AIM) API will also become a standard supported by many vendors.   All the open source storage systems and even Google will fully support the S3 API. Microsoft will not and will attempt to keep a standards war alive.

2. Multi-Cloud

2019 will be the year of multi-cloud services.  Instead of getting locked into any one vendor’s walled garden (think AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, Oracle), customers will pick best of breed services from different vendors.

We’ll be writing and working on multi-cloud a lot more in 2019, so stay tuned.

3. Fewer storage tiers

At AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago, Amazon announced two more storage tiers, bringing their total to six.  Gartner recently said that anyone moving data to the cloud needs to have a full-time head just to figure out the most cost-effective strategy for moving data among tiers.

It’s gone over the top.  Nobody can figure out all the complexities and developers don’t want to be spending their time implementing strategies for shifting data from one storage tier to another.

We predict the trend will reverse and head toward simpler, more rational storage pricing and strategies.

4. The end of egress fees

No more paying to use your own data. Customers hate egress fees more than anything else about cloud storage. First, you never know in advance how much you’re going to spend on egress, thereby making it impossible to budget. Second, the idea that you have to pay to get your own data back just feels like a rip-off. Wasabi, the new kid on the cloud-storage block, has eliminated egress fees completely (and all the other nickel and dime charges on a typical AWS bill) and eventually (probably not in 2019) others will be forced to do the same. The end is near.

In 2018, it’s been interesting to see this take off – first by us, then the bandwidth alliance, our partnership with Packet and growing by the day. In 2019, we only see this trend continuing on.

5. Ever lower prices and faster speeds for storage

In the brief time that Wasabi has been on the market, we have seen the capacity of hard drives increase from 8TB to 15TB. Some disk manufacturers are already demonstrating 100TB drives in the lab.  We predict a 20-30% annual reduction in the cost of disk storage for at least the next 7 years.

6. Special Bonus: Object Storage will dominate from a size perspective

Cloud storage today includes both object storage (like Wasabi or Amazon S3) and block storage (like IBM Cloud Block Storage or Amazon Elastic Block Storage).

The vast majority of all data will be in object storage because the volumes are in video (media & entertainment, consumer video, surveillance, etc), genomics (could become the largest consumer of cloud storage in the world), still images (consumer, industrial, defense-related, scientific), and IoT (everything these days is generating data).

Most companies seem to be completely unaware of object storage and why it’s the best choice for massive storage needs. It’s such a game changer, and we’re all going to need it to handle the massive data growth we’re seeing every day. Combine cloud and object storage, and welcome to truly huge data.

These are the predictions we see unfolding in 2019 – and of course there is plenty we’re working on that we will be announcing throughout the year. From all of us at Wasabi, have a happy and healthy 2019!