Research Outline

Cloud Storage Providers

Goals

To look for the biggest cloud storage providers by volume of storage preserved on their systems and the providers that are growing the fastest in order to conduct market research.

Early Findings

  • The largest cloud storage providers in terms of the number of users include iCloud (300 million users), Google (200 million users), Microsoft OneDrive (250 million users), Dropbox (300 million users), and Box (25 million users).
  • As per a Gartner report, the following providers were rated according to their capabilities in terms of capacity: Caringo Swarm (4.0), Cloudian HyperStore (4.3), DDN WOS (3.5), Dell EMC ECS (4.3), Hitachi Vantara HCP (4.1), Huawei FusionStorage (4.0), IBM COS (4.5), NetApp StorageGRID (4.2), Red Hat Ceph (4.0), Scality RING (4.3), SUSE Enterprise Storage (4.0), SwiftStack Storage (4.1), Western Digital ActiveScale (4.3).
  • IBM Cloud Object Storage was rated as having one of the largest cloud storage repositories in the world with the top two having over 800PB of storage.
  • The cloud storage market ($30.7 billion in 2017) is expected to grow at a CAGR of 23.7% during 2017-2022. The major cloud storage providers are AWS (US), IBM (US), Microsoft (US), Google (US), HPE (US), VMware (US), Rackspace (US), and Dell EMC (US).
  • "North America is expected to hold the largest cloud storage market share and APAC to grow at the fastest rate. North America is expected to hold the largest market share during the forecast period, as organizations are shifting toward cloud storage solutions and services, with an increasing adoption of digital business strategies. Furthermore, organizations have invested heavily in advanced technologies to gain a competitive advantage and improve business operations."
  • As of 2016, AWS accounted for 45% of the revenue generated by public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers and was estimated to be bigger than the next three players combined, including Microsoft, Google, and IBM, according to Synergy Research.
  • Health is the next sector that cloud storage companies are looking to tap into. As of 2019, Amazon, Microsoft Corp., and Alphabet Inc. "are striking sweeping agreements to store data and develop software for hospitals, as the technology giants wrestle for control in health-care and cloud-computing markets."