The Trends IT Leaders Think 2025 Will Bring in Sustainability, AI, and Media

Around this time every year, it falls to me to give my thoughts on what the new year will hold for us in the technology space. I boil down trends and fads to their constituent parts and inevitably conclude that data storage will be crucial to all of it, to no one’s surprise.  

This year, our team took a different approach. We reached out to our partners and customers across industries for their thoughts on what 2025 might have in store. Their expertise on sustainability, AI, and media give them unique insights into how those fields are set to transform in the new year, and what data demands they might require.  

Renewable energy in data centers 

Sustainability continues to be a big driver in IT purchasing decisions. In a 2023 survey, 44% of respondents claimed sustainability was the most important consideration when choosing a cloud storage service, even more so than performance and scalability. If you're in the data center industry, the problem isn't land or buildings or anything of that sort. Now, the big problem is power.  

Hemanth Setty, founder of sustainability group Zerocircle, is tackling that problem head-on. To him, the advances in AI (more on that later) are only exacerbating the resource consumption of data centers. Renewable solutions in electricity and cooling are great but are hemmed in by geographic limitations.

To Setty, the efficiencies that will solve the data center power question come from a two-pronged approach: sustainable data centers and energy-efficient computation. With these compute-intensive workloads drawing less power, it’ll be easier for renewable sources of energy and cooling to get the job done. 

Now, storage is not nearly as big an energy draw as compute. CPUs draw a lot of power, especially GPUs.  A spinning hard drive, not so much.  In fact, as the capacity of disk drives increases, the motor consumes the same amount of power, so the power consumption per bit improves. With the next generation of solid-state storage coming along (it's already here, but it's still expensive relative to rotating disks) we'll see almost a 10-to-1 reduction in the amount of power that's consumed to store the same amount of data. 

Advances in AI 

AI’s role in the marketplace is a little bit like when the internet first came out. There was an explosion of creativity and new ideas as the internet evolved, and people were doing things that nobody had ever seen or thought possible. Some of them worked out and some of them didn't, and eventually it all settled down. But in the end, it was obviously world changing. This, I predict, will be AI’s path.  

Uptal Mangla, General Manager at IBM Cloud Platform thinks AI is only getting started. He predicts AI will follow a threefold path as it sweeps its way into widespread adoption.  

1) Openness 

Businesses are looking for an open architecture, an open framework, and the ability to go deep into it and see what the sources are, where they are coming from, and how those models are built.  

2) Governance 

Customers need to know they are working from a foundation of trust in their AI platform. There should be checks and balances in place to build that trust. 

3) Data  

Data is fundamental to AI’s success. The quality and origin of that data are the building blocks of any AI model. The source of and trust in datasets will be essential for the proliferation of AI as a technology.  

This third point is of particular interest to us at Wasabi. Our position in this is pretty simple because anything you do with AI involves large amounts of data. The more data you have for training, the better your models are going to work. After all, every railroad needs its shovels.  

Demands of Media

Media has long been a driver of storage technology and practices. The demands of video storage can be high considering the format’s capacity requirements.  

For Josh Carley, VP of Technology for TD Garden and the Boston Bruins, there are 100 years of franchise history to protect. You can imagine what they’ve got sitting in a dusty bin somewhere, and it’s no good to anybody if it can’t be viewed, accessed, and kept alive by the team. For Carley, there is no alternative to cloud storage for maintaining an archive of this size. When a returning player visits the arena, or they want to honor a Bruins alumnus, finding what they need when they need it is only possible through the scale afforded by cloud storage.  

Indeed, there is increased interest in migrating media from LTO tapes to cloud storage. There are massive video archives of movies, TV shows, sports events, podcasts, news programs, interviews, home movies, and other media sitting mostly on tape in storage vaults. Organizations want these archives to live in the cloud where they can be accessed instantly and utilized rather than ignored.  

Jordy de Muijnk, Infrastructure and Networks teamlead at broadcaster ITV, similarly shared Carley's views on the cloud's role in media's future.

One thing is for sure: 2025 will produce more data than 2024, and storage will continue to be an essential commodity for businesses across industries and for emerging technologies. And it will continue to be Wasabi’s mission to store that data affordably and efficiently.