IDC Forecast Shows Continued Strong Growth of Storage Capacity

Despite the decline in IT spending brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, IDC expects the worldwide installed base of storage capacity will continue to expand. In a new update to its Global StorageSphere forecast, IDC estimates that the installed base of storage capacity worldwide will grow to 6.8 zettabytes (ZB) this year, an increase of 16.6% over 2019. Over the course of the 2019-2024 forecast, IDC expects the installed base of storage capacity to achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.8%.

"The volume of data stored in the Global StorageSphere is doubling approximately every four years," said John Rydning, research vice president, IDC's Global DataSphere. "While the COVID-19 pandemic will hamper economic growth and IT spending, it will have little impact on the expansion of the Global StorageSphere as consumers and organizations are likely to extend the useful life of existing storage capacity to keep up with the demand for storing more data, especially near term.

IDC's Global StorageSphere measures the size of the worldwide installed base of storage capacity across six types of storage media, and how much of the storage capacity is utilized or available each year. The installed base of storage capacity is a cumulative metric: it is equivalent to the amount of new storage capacity deployed over the span of several years minus the systems or storage devices that either fail or are retired or decommissioned each year. The Global StorageSphere is a product of IDC's Global DataSphere program, which measures how much new data is created and/or replicated each year.

The amount of data being stored (utilized storage) is expected to grow to 8.9ZB by 2024, representing a 2019-2024 CAGR of 20.4%. Moreover, the share of utilized storage in the Global StorageSphere installed base is expected to reach 67.5% in 2024, up more than 7 percentage points from the beginning of the forecast. The growth in cloud storage is affecting the mix and share of the Global StorageSphere installed base between core, edge, and endpoint. HDD storage makes up the majority of the StorageSphere installed base, although it will decline from 65.0% of the installed base in 2019 to about 54% in 2024.