TMCnet News

Technavio Announces Top Four Emerging Trends Impacting the Global SMB and SME NAS Market Through 2020
[February 01, 2016]

Technavio Announces Top Four Emerging Trends Impacting the Global SMB and SME NAS Market Through 2020


Technavio's latest report on the global SMB and SME NAS market provides an analysis of the most important trends expected to impact the market outlook through 2020. Technavio defines an emerging trend as a factor that has the potential to significantly impact the market and contribute to its growth or decline.

The research study reports that the global SMB and SME NAS market was valued at USD 4.4 billion in 2015 and is expected to reach USD 18.1 billion by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 33%.

"NAS systems play a vital role in the operational needs of every business. In terms of small office home office (SOHO), SMBs and SMEs need NAS for a cost-effective and reliable private cloud environment that offers exceptional performance, scalability, and durability. The market for NAS among SMEs, SOHO, and SMBs is likely to grow significantly due to continuous innovations by vendors, including increased ability to work even in mission-critical environments," said Technavio lead analyst Rakesh Panda who specializes in data centers.

The top four emerging trends driving the global SMB and SME NAS market according to Technavio's ICT research analysts are:

Hybrid storage arrays

SAN and NAS were earlier considered as two separate storage appliances, with the former being block-based and the latter file-based storage. Both the storage systems have their own advantages and disadvantages when it comes to implementation. Vendors in the storage market are offering hybrid SAN-NAS solutions, through which businesses can merge both block and file-based data in a common array.

For example, many systems manufactured by QNAP and Synology are hybrid storage systems. NAS as an enterprise-class disk array offers many benefits for file-based data operations, and improves scalability.

SAN-NAS architecture is considered to be more complex compared to their individual implementations, which over the forecast period is expected to become more simplified for use by entrprises. Through these initiations, enterprises do not have to be dependent on one particular architecture for their changing requirements.



Increased use of flash storage

SSD storage, commonly known as flash storage, offers greater efficiency compared to the traditional HDD storage device. The cost of flash storage is several times greater than that of HDD storage. However, vendors are continuously decreasing their product prices because of an increased demand for storage in the market. We expect flash storage usage in small business environments to equal HDD usage by the end of the forecast period.


Cloud-based NAS

Cloud-based NAS is a remote storage that can be accessed over the Internet. It is also termed as cloud NAS-as-a-service, and is often used for backups and archiving. This storage is hosted by a third-party service provider that charges enterprises based on the capacity and bandwidth utilized. This cloud-based service can be accessed from anywhere and at any time. However, the data transfer rate is dependent on network connection.

"There are several vendors currently involved in integrating the existing NAS system with the popular cloud storage services such as Amazon S3. Western Digital (News - Alert), a provider of external and internal hard drives, offers NAS solutions as My Cloud products," said Rakesh. "NAS systems are used in cloud data centers for storage provisioning purposes. Integration of on-premises NAS with cloud storage will gain traction in the future among small business, as it allows overall control over the latest data in the NAS, as well as facilitates the backing up and archiving of data in the cloud."

Evolution of Big Data analytics

Big Data analytics has triggered widespread technological progress in the enterprise storage sector. Small businesses implement Big Data analytics and associated analytical approaches to gain information on business forecasts. On-the-go business is a popular trend, which is achieved through technological advances in mobile devices and tablets.

Data is constantly being fed into storage systems and traditional storage systems are not feasible to run analytics on massive sets of complex data. Vendors in the market are offering NAS storage systems that are suitable for analytical purposes and likely to trigger product innovations during the forecast period.

Some of the top vendors in the global SMB and SME NAS market as analyzed by Technavio's analysts are:

  • Buffalo Technology
  • QNAP
  • Netgear
  • Seagate (News - Alert)
  • Synology
  • Western Digital

Browse Related Reports:

Purchase these three reports for the price of one by becoming a Technavio subscriber. Subscribing to Technavio's reports allows you to download any three reports per month for the price of one. Contact [email protected] with your requirements and a link to our subscription platform.

About Technavio

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. The company develops over 2000 pieces of research every year, covering more than 500 technologies across 80 countries. Technavio has about 300 analysts globally who specialize in customized consulting and business research assignments across the latest leading edge technologies.

Technavio analysts employ primary as well as secondary research techniques to ascertain the size and vendor landscape in a range of markets. Analysts obtain information using a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches, besides using in-house market modeling tools and proprietary databases. They corroborate this data with the data obtained from various market participants and stakeholders across the value chain, including vendors, service providers, distributors, re-sellers, and end-users.

If you are interested in more information, please contact our media team at [email protected].


[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]