Scality announced its data storage predictions for 2021, which will be focused on the rapid growth rate of cloud-native apps and containerization.

It is predicted that, by 2023, over 500 million digital apps and services are going to be developed and deployed using cloud-native approaches. This increase in cloud-native digital apps and services will become the new requirements in most industries. 2021 will thus witness new trends emerge as enterprise IT teams and storage vendors will try to adapt themselves in order to support the rise of cloud-native apps and the change in application and cloud infrastructure models.

The report revealed the emergence of a new container-centric storage solution to address the evolving scale and agility demands of container-based services. These new container-centric storage products will be created to enable traditional data-centric applications and object storage and backups, to access Container Storage Interface (CSI)-type persistent volumes and radically decrease the complexity of large-scale Kubernetes deployments.

It also found out that hybrid cloud data management will be implemented for disaster recovery. Hybrid cloud DR solutions managing synchronized copies of critical data on-premises and in the public cloud will allow IT leaders to avoid the spend money on maintaining two remote locations for disaster recovery.

The research reported that flash media will be embraced for high-capacity storage, which will become more available in 2021. These low-cost and higher-density flash media will adopt capacity-optimized solutions in order to maximize the benefits in density, scale, and agility for various workloads.

Moreover, object storage will become a common storage model for data lakes, which are predicted to grow into a $20.1 Billion market. In 2021, object storage is to become the dominant storage interface for analytics applications, such as Cloudera, Elastic, and many others. This is due to the fact they are a natural fit for object storage, as well as the fact that performance and capacity resources can scale independently.

2021 will also see an increased convergence of object and file storage for unstructured data. Since cloud-native applications are largely deployed in the enterprise alongside long-standing applications, solutions that combine file and object models into single unified systems will prevail in the enterprise starting in 2021.

Finally, the service mesh will be adopted to connect and secure workloads, with complex cloud-native applications becoming largely popular. Although secure communication between these services remains a challenge, it is predicted that, in 2021, ‘service mesh’ approaches to secure network communication will be broadly implemented. This will enforce Transport Layer Security (TLS) and authentication and access control for both workload connectivity as well as towards the edge.