4 top data storage trends for 2026

1. AI integration is becoming standard

Over the past two years, one of the most significant trends in enterprise storage has been the integration of AI[AG1] . In 2026, however, the industry has moved away from AI integration being a novelty and has reached the point at which AI integration into storage appliances is becoming a standard. As such, administrators are increasingly using AI for tasks such as tiering, migration, optimization, provisioning and even backups and other forms of data protection, such as for failure predictions.

Many vendors are now using AI as a tool for predicting and possibly even remediating issues before they happen. In the past, storage appliances would only alert admins to problems that had already happened. Oftentimes, these alerts involved a simple light that illuminated on the appliance (much like the check engine light on a car) or a cryptic error code, and it was up to the admin to figure out what the problem was and how to fix it. With AI, however, appliances could anticipate problems before they occur and instruct admins to take proactive steps to prevent the issue.

AI can enhance data tiering. At its simplest, data tiering seeks the best possible end-user experience by moving hot data to a high-speed storage tier. Cooler, less frequently used data is moved off the high-speed tier and onto the cheaper but slower high-capacity tier. Some data tiering platforms also include cloud tiers.

In the past, access patterns determined the movement of data between storage tiers. AI can help make the end-user experience better by learning users' data access habits. An AI engine could anticipate the files that users will access at a given time and preemptively move those files to the high-speed tier for the best possible performance.

As an AI engine learns the users' data access patterns, it can distinguish between normal and abnormal behavior. As such, AI could identify a security incident or a ransomware attack by its data access patterns and then take steps to shut down the attack before it causes significant damage. AI could also recognize which files have been encrypted during the early stages of a thwarted ransomware attack and automatically roll those files back to their unencrypted state.

Admins can also use AI as a tool for assisting with storage optimization. A storage admin might, for example, use AI to analyze usage patterns and system resource consumption. An AI engine can then use this information to make recommendations on how to allocate resources to avoid issues, reduce costs or both.

2. Hybrid and Multicloud Storage

Although hybrid cloud and multicloud environments have existed for quite some time, organizations have standardized around hybrid multicloud storage. It has become the standard, default approach to enterprise storage. As such, storage vendors are increasingly developing tools that simplify the management of hybrid multicloud storage.

Given the widespread adoption of hybrid multicloud storage, vendors are increasingly offering unified control panes that act as a single management platform for all storage, regardless of its type or location. These control planes enable admins to apply a policy once and have it enforced everywhere. It also gives admins the ability to view all their data, whether it's on-premises, in the cloud, at the edge or elsewhere. Such interfaces also allow admins to manage performance, cost, security and even data lifecycles.

3. Cyber Resilient Storage

At one time, enterprise storage focused heavily on making sure that organizations didn't lose data as a result of hardware failures. While this is still undeniably important, storage vendors are increasingly focusing on cyber resilience, or making sure that storage platforms are protected against security threats such as ransomware. In other words, enterprise storage hardware is no longer passive, but it instead plays an active role in data security.

There are several key features that enable cyber resilience. One such feature is immutable snapshots that cannot be modified or deleted by ransomware. These snapshots provide organizations with a way to roll back their data to its original state prior to an attack.

Storage vendors are also increasingly making it easier to create air-gapped backups. Air-gapped backups have existed in one form or another for more than half a century, but fell out of fashion as cloud backups started to become popular. At its simplest, an air-gapped backup is just a backup that is written to removable media (such as tape) and then detached from the system. The renewed interest in air-gapped backups stems from the fact that ransomware cannot encrypt a backup that is not mounted.

Among the cyber resilience tools that vendors offer, some vendor tools also include features that can detect unusual activity (such as mass file changes) and options for performing recovery operations more quickly.

4. Storage Native Cost Governance

One of the undesirable side effects of cloud storage adoption and consumption-based storage pricing in the data center is the occurrence of unexpected costs. These pricing models make it easy to accidentally rack up a huge bill without even realizing it. This is where native storage cost governance comes into play.

While the actual implementation varies from one vendor to the next, the main goals behind storage native cost governance are to help an organization more easily assess its storage cost and to automatically take steps to reduce that cost. Since modern storage management tools so often span hybrid multicloud environments, such a tool is able to see an organization's entire storage footprint. As such, it could break down costs by application, team, or project. Such a tool can be useful for helping an organization determine which datasets are the most expensive and where the money is actually being spent.

Additionally, storage-native cost governance tools can forecast spending and generate alerts when preset spending thresholds are reached. The underlying tools could also allow an admin to create rules, such as "if data hasn't been used for 90 days, move it somewhere less expensive".

Brien Posey is a former 22-time Microsoft MVP and a commercial astronaut candidate. In his more than 30 years in IT, he has served as a lead network engineer for the U.S. Department of Defense and a network administrator for some of the largest insurance companies in America.