Your optimism about the future is great, maybe I can join back in again after listening to the Town Hall today. But anyway I really hope to receive an answer: If forecasting 5 years ahead is too challenging for Storj, I’d be happy to hear the timeframe that the company is happy with to share forecasting, goals and plans. What is the Storj goal for the amount of customer data storage by the end of 2025 for example?
With my mentioning of 1 EB in 2030, my intention was to make clear that a goal like this inherently requires a strategy and planning. This involves breaking down the objective into actionable steps to achieve it. To point out what such an overall objective would mean broken down into shorter term e.g. yearly objectives: Achieving 1 EB in 5 years means an average of 200 Petabytes of additional customer data per year. This is massive when we look at the current quantity of stored data as of today. To reach such a goal or just getting even close to it, it appears to me that significant changes would be required.
It would likely require a multi-faceted strategy, including substantial investments in sales and marketing, maybe even additional acquisitions or a fundamentally different approach to markets. That would be no longer a matter of just incremental growth, but rather a transformative effort that would require a strategy, careful planning, execution and resource allocation.
Long term goals are not unusual by the way: In the context of enterprise business, strategy planning typically involves setting long-term goals, often with a 3-5 year horizon, and then derive shorter-term objectives which lead to actual actions. Such planning will allow to allocate resources, invest in infrastructure, and make informed decisions about the future direction. Given the complexity and scale of data storage, it’s reasonable to expect that Storj have already begun planning for the next 3 to 5 to 10 years.
It’s worth noting that Storj competitors traditional data centers or other distributed storage solutions likewise are not sleeping. Companies such as Wasabi, have already planned and built exabyte-scale storage capacities. This level of investment and planning requires a significant amount of forecasting and strategic planning, often 5-10 years ahead. If companies like Wasabi can plan and execute on such a large scale, it’s reasonable to expect that other players in the industry, like yours, have also begun to think about their long-term strategy.
To put 200 PB per year into perspective, the total amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed globally is expected to reach 175 zettabytes (ZB) by 2025, according to IDC’s Global DataSphere Forecast. This represents a significant increase from the 64.2 ZB of data created in 2020. Moreover, the amount of data stored in the cloud is expected to reach 100 ZB by 2025, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.6% from 2020 to 2025. We see already 394 Zettabytes of data/information created, captured, copied, and consumed worldwide for 2028 (Data growth worldwide 2010-2028 | Statista) and 500 Zettabytes for 2030 (IDC), underscoring the unstoppable trajectory of data growth, which could mean with the same ratio applied that we are talking about approximately 300 ZB of data stored in the cloud by then.
The overall question is, what share of this does Storj want, what is reasonable and finally what is required to reach it?
Exabyte storage capacity had already been a topic for Storj as far back as 2022 when on https://forum.storj.io/t/lets-talk-about-the-elephant-in-the-room-the-storj-economic-model-node-operator-payout-model
@John had stated
Or as @Knowledge has said:
Back then it sounded like Storj has a vision, a goal and a plan. The current results are modest at best in my opinion. I believe it’s essential to have a clear strategy in place and clear goals to bring up the most suitable actions to address the ever growing demand for cloud data storage. To put it with @BrightSilence