![\"Mark](\"http:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/mark_whitby.jpg\")
<\/a>Mark Whitby, Vice President at Seagate<\/p><\/div>\n
When asked what the biggest challenge in the storage industry will be over the next five years,\u00a0Mark Whitby<\/a>, Vice President at storage vendor, told Techradar<\/a>: \u00a0“Three words: data capacity gap… Data has never been more important.\u00a0 As valuable as oil and just as difficult to mine, model and manage, data is swiftly becoming a vital asset to businesses the world over…\u00a0We are entering a world where everything is connecting to everything else and the resulting big data is anticipated to solve virtually all our problems. However, by 2016, the hard drives housed in all those connected devices, whirring away in countless data centres, will start to reach their limits.”<\/p>\n Could Whitby be right? \u00a0Possibly. \u00a0But you’d never guess that now. \u00a0The cost of storage<\/a> continues to drop and storage densities<\/a> are continually increasing.<\/p>\n Bernard Marr<\/a>, CEO, Advanced Performance Institute,\u00a0explains that<\/a> “the reason that we have not yet run out [of storage space] is due to the fact that much of the data that is generated is transient \u2013 it is only stored temporarily for as long as it is immediately useful, and then written over \u2013 for example streamed content from Youtube or Netflix which is stored locally until you have finished watching it… \u00a0The fact remains though, that the growth in worldwide volume of data is increasingly outpacing the manufacture of physical storage space.”<\/p>\n<\/a><\/div><\/a><\/div><\/a><\/div><\/a><\/div><\/a><\/div><\/a><\/div><\/a><\/div><\/a><\/div><\/a><\/div><\/a><\/div><\/a><\/div><\/a><\/div>