The past year brought intense macroeconomic uncertainty—from persistent inflation and global market volatility to workforce challenges across industries. Even so, worldwide IT spending is projected to reach $5.1 trillion in 2024, an 8% year-over-year increase according to Gartner. Much of this momentum is driven by enterprises accelerating adoption of AI-powered applications to handle the rapid expansion of data.
Below are four major trends expected to shape global data management and storage strategies in 2024.
Prediction 1: AI Becomes the Core Driver of Data Management Innovation #
AI is reshaping how enterprises view and use their data. Instead of a storage-centric mindset, organizations are shifting to a data-centric model where data quality, governance, and accessibility become strategic assets.
This shift is transforming the role of the traditional storage administrator into a Data Asset Manager—a position increasingly seen as revenue-critical. Just as financial asset managers are recognized for their direct business impact, companies are beginning to value the strategic importance of professionals who manage, curate, and unlock insights from enterprise data.
Organizations that fail to modernize their data processes risk losing competitive advantage. As data assets become central to revenue growth, demand for skilled Data Asset Managers is expected to surge, with compensation likely to double within five years.
Prediction 2: Managing Unstructured Data Growth Will Reduce Costs and Free Up IT Budgets #
Gartner predicts that unstructured data will triple over the next three years. However, with disciplined data strategies, enterprises can reduce the growth rate to more manageable levels.
Given that global IT budgets are increasing modestly—around 5.1% in 2023—simply expanding storage infrastructures is no longer sustainable. In 2024, organizations will increasingly prioritize:
- Data consolidation
- Data cleansing
- Elimination of duplicate or stale data
- Understanding data ownership and usage patterns
Cloud migration often serves as a catalyst for this process, encouraging companies to clean up data before moving it. Without these efforts, storage costs for unstructured data can escalate rapidly, particularly with legacy vendors that encourage storing more data to drive infrastructure sales.
By containing unstructured data growth—ideally to double rather than triple—organizations can prevent runaway storage costs and free up valuable IT budgets to support innovation instead of maintenance.
Prediction 3: Responsible Growth Will Define Tech Industry Success in 2024 #
While the tech sector continues to advance despite economic uncertainty, the intense race to capitalize on AI has pushed many companies into aggressive expansion without sustainable financial planning. Over the past year, many firms have been correcting this imbalance, resulting in widespread layoffs.
In 2024, companies that focus on responsible, sustainable growth will be the ones that thrive. These organizations will:
- Maintain financial discipline
- Attract and retain top talent
- Continue investing in AI and innovation
- Build resilience against market volatility
Responsible growth—not rapid expansion—will be a defining competitive advantage.
Prediction 4: 2024 Marks the Beginning of a New Era of Global Data Sharing #
As enterprises fully recognize the strategic value of proprietary unstructured data, 2024 will usher in a new era of cross-organizational, cross-regional data sharing.
A deeper understanding of data creates unprecedented advantages. For example, in the energy sector, petabyte-scale unstructured file data must be shared, accessed, and protected across multiple geographies. Better data sharing enables:
- Faster decision-making
- More accurate exploration and modeling
- More efficient use of global resources
To support this evolution, organizations will increasingly adopt platforms that allow centralized data management while meeting regional governance and compliance requirements.
However, this broader data sharing also increases exposure to ransomware, which remains one of the most pervasive global threats. As a result, enterprises must prioritize:
- Globally consistent data protection
- Rapid recovery strategies
- Careful selection of technology partners
The true value of data—long locked inside infrastructure—will finally be unlocked through intelligent sharing, fueling innovation across industries.