Network Attached Storage (NAS) Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2021 - 2026)

The Network Attached Storage (NAS) Market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of about 19.5% during the forecast period 2021-2026. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the demand for cloud-based solutions, owing to remote working models being adopted by enterprises. The pandemic has also acted as a catalyst for the growth of data usage. Enterprises across various end-user industries, especially telecom companies across emerging nations, have witnessed a surge in data usage due to lockdowns imposed by the governments. In such times, organizations are seeking an established and secured data storage solution.

Key Highlights

• Further, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced an unprecedented and unpredictable state of emergency on various levels. In these times of crisis, data has been assisting enterprises with the better decision-making process. Having consistency is the only solution to ensure that the insights generated by analyses are useful and actionable.
• It is estimated that more than 80% of midmarket and enterprise organizations are using NAS for some tier of storage in exceeding capacity when compared to other storage types, such as DAS (Direct Attached Storage) and SAN (Storage Area Network). The major factors driving the market include - explosion in unstructured data, increasing the footprint of scale-out NAS in enterprise IT systems, and focus on network virtualization and software-defined NAS.
• The increasing adoption of NAS systems in enterprise environments is driving vendors toward creating customized NAS solutions for businesses aiming at NAS as a full-fledged data management solution.
• The integration of on-premise NAS with cloud storage is expected to gain traction in the future, facilitating total control over the data in the NAS and in backing up and archiving data in the cloud. Several vendors are involved in integrating the existing NAS system with the popular cloud storage services, like Amazon S3 especially, for storage provisioning.
• The ease of access, reasonably low cost, and high capacity are some of the significant features attracting the enterprise. It also provides a performance advantage over DAS in many cases, especially when multiple devices need to access storage. NAS may also be more effective than SAN for some workloads depending on network traffic factors and storage communication protocol preferences.
• The growing cloud adoption can hinder the studied market growth; however, the integration of on-premise NAS with cloud storage is expected to gain traction in the future, facilitating total control over the data in the NAS and in backing up and archiving data in the cloud.
• In July 2021, Taiwan -based network-attached storage (NAS) manufacturer QNAP announced that it had addressed a critical security vulnerability that could have enabled attackers to compromise its NAS devices' security. The improper access control vulnerability tracked as CVE -2021 - 28809 was found by the TXOne IoT/ICS Security Research Labs in HBS 3 Hybrid Backup Sync, which is QNAP's disaster recovery and data backup solution. The security issue was caused by buggy software that does not correctly restrict the attackers from gaining access to the system resources enabling them to escalate privileges, execute commands remotely, or read sensitive info without authorization.

Key Market Trends

Increasing Adoption of Cloud Hindering the Growth of the Market

• The deployment of these solutions over the cloud offers greater convenience, as the service vendor is responsible for providing maximum uptime, data security, and periodic updates, thus decreasing the total cost of ownership.
• These network-attached storage devices have been providing a convenient means of offloading and creating data backups from the computers while maintaining remote access to the files. These units are storing information in a centralized location and providing access for authorized on-site and network access using secure dedicated IP addresses. These devices offer various features that are handy and versatile to meet the needs of home users and small and large businesses.
• The current market trends, including the delivery of these solutions on the pay-as-you-go model and SaaS models, wherein the service vendors also assume the responsibility of maintaining data and application information, are further driving the adoption of these solutions.
• Moreover, this mode has recorded an increase in deployment in small-/medium-scale businesses, as it cuts down the capital expenditure involved in building the required infrastructure on their premises. This continuing trend is significantly hindering the growth of the market.
• In Jan 2020, QNAP also announced its new budget-friendly two-bay NAS aimed at home users supporting hardware accelerated media playback. The TS-251D stores up to 32 TB of data and can be further expanded with a PCIe card to add SSD caching or other options.

North America to Hold Highest Share in the Market

• North America holds the largest market share due to its early adoption of advanced analytics solutions involving huge data storage requirements. They make use of Network-attached storage when it is attached to a network with the help of ethernet ports or USB. These are allocated to an IP address so that the end-user can directly access it.
• The United States is projected to hold the highest share within the region. The United States accounts for 30% of the global market share in digital transformation led by the professional services, discrete manufacturing, and transportation industries.
• The usage of digital solutions in these sectors has resulted in the generation of significant amounts of unstructured data, because of which companies are deploying more NAS systems to accommodate the high number of files and users in this region.
• The NAS systems are being adopted rapidly due to the increasing development of hybrid cloud storage. It is resulting in an increase in the demand for redundancy, data back-up, manageability, superior data scalability. The increasing use of smart devices like laptops and smartphones is creating a massive volume of data, expanding the market demand and growth.
• The presence of market incumbents, such as IBM Corporation, HP Development Company, and Seagate Technology, in the storage segment is another factor that is expected to promote the growth of the NAS market.

Competitive Landscape

The network-attached storage market is highly fragmented. Earlier, the big players dominated the NAS market. However, the growing demand from enterprises for data storage is also attracting many new players into the market, making the market competitive. Some key players include ZyXEL Communications Corporation, Thecus Technology Corporation, Drobo Inc., Asustor Inc., Dell EMC, Buffalo Technology Inc., Hewlett-Packard Development Company, Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, NetApp Inc., International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation, Seagate Technology PLC, among others.

• March 2021 - HITACHI VSP 5000 was launched. It is the world's fastest NVME flash array. It has workload diversity that supports all workloads from mainframe to container. It comes with the right size capacity and service levels. It is implemented with mixed NVMe and SAS, which helps optimize performance and workload cost. Powerful virtualization adds capability to legacy systems. It is a fast and easy upgrade to NVMe and SCM over Fabrics (NVMe-oF).
• June 2021 - Dell EMC's Unity XT hybrid storage systems have the raw performance to ensure that controllers don't become the limiting factor, enabling users to scale as needed to keep pace with application IOPS, latency, and capacity growth and are designed for 5-9's availability. Unity XT hybrid array IO is accelerated with FAST Cache or SSD Read Cache to deliver the performance of flash with lower-priced MLC flash drives.

Additional Benefits:

• The market estimate (ME) sheet in Excel format
• 3 months of analyst support