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

The Network Attached Storage (NAS) Market was valued at USD 21.55 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach USD 62.77 billion by 2026 and work at a CAGR of 19.5% over the forecast period 2021-2026. 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 and SAN. The major factors driving the market include - explosion in unstructured data, increasing 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. Depending on network traffic factors and storage communication protocol preferences, NAS may also be more effective than SAN for some workloads.
• 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 February 2019, US-based Pure Storage introduced its ObjectEngine, a cloud backup target for FlashBlade NAS appliances, mainly to reduce data locally and shuttle it to S3-based object storage for analytics, DR, and reuse.