The world of data storage has seen significant innovation over the years. This year, companies will continue to adopt these storage technologies and storage vendors will continue to innovate and develop exciting products and services. Here are my top 5 storage trends for this year:

1. Software-defined storage (SDS) or storage virtualization will start to have huge adoption in tier-2 or tier-3 storage. Virtual storage appliances such as Nutanix and Virtual SAN-like solutions such as VMware virtual-SAN will find their way in companies looking for simple converged solutions.

2. The cost of flash storage will continue to drop, driving its deployment to tier-1, I/O intensive applications such as VDI. Flash storage will also continue to be used on server-side flash, and on hybrid or tiered-based appliances.

3. Small and medium companies will make headway in utilizing the cloud for storage, but mostly as backup and sync-and-share applications.

4. Storage vendors will release products with integrated data protection including encryption, archiving, replication, backup, and disaster recovery.

5. Finally, the demand for storage will continue to grow because of the explosion of big data, the “internet of things”, and large enterprises building redundant data centers.