ST2401

COMMENT
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PREDICTING THE (AI) FUTURE
BY DAVID TYLER
EDITOR
Welcome to the first Storage magazine of 2024, which includes our now
regular round-up of predictions, trends (and perhaps some downright
guesswork) from industry experts as to what they believe will be the big
storage stories for this year.
It should be no surprise to our long-term readers that one of the most discussed
topics - albeit from a wide variety of perspectives - was the future of AI. More than one
of our commentators pointed out that the rush to gain a business advantage from AI is
likely to highlight data infrastructure issues that have been easy to ignore until recently.
As Nasuni's Jim Liddle comments: "Before they can integrate AI effectively,
organisations will first have to address how they collect, store, and manage their
unstructured data, particularly at the edge. AI doesn't work in a vacuum and it's just
one part of the broader data intelligence umbrella. In the coming year, companies
across the board will be forced to come to terms with the data quality, governance,
access, and storage requirements of AI before they can move forward with digital
transformation or improvement programmes to give them the desired competitive
edge."
One area where AI is certain to be deployed more widely in 2024 is in threat
detection and data protection, as Ctera's Aron Brand argues: "AI's advanced anomaly
recognition capabilities will enable early detection of potential threats, offering a
proactive defence mechanism. This will be complemented by built-in disaster recovery
features, ensuring swift response and recovery in the event of a breach."
Perhaps less obvious an application is the potential of AI to help with organisations'
attempts to shift to a greener storage approach. Infinidat's Eric Herzog says:
"Enterprises will increasingly turn to AI for the capabilities to optimise storage capacity
and streamline management, resulting in more efficiency. Gartner predicts that by
2025 half of all data centres will deploy AI/ML to increase efficiency by up to 30%. AI
will also be used to optimise cooling."
At the same time, AI might turn out to be part of the arsenal of the ransomware bad
guys as well, as Tintri's Brock Mowry comments: "Bad actors are doing their R&D.
2024 will see new and undiscovered attack vectors leveraging the intelligence and
power of AI. This will be the new adversary of blue teams in the enterprise."
Whatever happens, it is very clear that AI will be absolutely central to pretty much
everything that happens in the storage industry in the coming years - and at the same
time, that storage itself will have to be a crucial consideration in the future
development of AI.
04 STORAGE
MAGAZINE
Jan/Feb 2024
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