Gartner’s storage sermon for 2026 – 2029

Enterprise storage planners and buyers must adopt cyber-storage, autonomous storage and manage by SLA outcomes

So says Gartner’s 2026 Strategic Roadmap for Storage as storage is “undergoing a profound transformation” because of data proliferation, AI, malware and cloud-like consumption models viewing storage as a service.

The roadmap is based on three strategic planning assumptions. First, less than five percent of enterprise storage admin tasks are governed by SLA outcomes and automated, policy-driven monitoring. It will rise to 33 percent by 2028.

Second, less than one percent of enterprise storage bosses have deployed agentic-AI-based autonomous storage infrastructure currently, the Gartnerites say – which is not surprising as the area is barely even in its infancy. Yet they pronounce that, by 2028, 20 percent of the storage heads will be deploying such such agentic storage management.

The third strategic planning assumption is that only 20 percent of deployed enterprise storage includes active, defence-focussed, cyberstorage capabilities. It will be 100 percent by 2029, which will be music to the ears of suppliers like Infinidat

With these three ideas in mind, Gartner recommends three actions by enterprise storage heads. SLA outcome-based management is the first, with storage consumption services set up to follow business priorities such as productivity and asset management.

They must have an absolutist approach to cyber-threats by mandating non-negotiable cyber-resilience SLAs with “accountable outcomes.” If the enterprise gets hit by storage-affecting cyber-attacks then the SLA deliverers will get hit as well. Gartner wants to have data storage cyber-threat exposure eliminated – a big ask.

Lastly, storage IT teams must achieve operational efficiencies and productivity gains by managing SLA outcomes instead of discrete hardware issues. They must mandate – that word again – autonomous capabilities based on ASI threshold events.

The current state of enterprise storage IT is delineated:

This is followed by a description of the future state:

Gartner presents a 5-point summary of the gap between the two, and a point-by-point migration plan:

It wants its readers to move from CAPEX storage expenditures to pay-for-use storage-as-a-service arrangements. They should consolidate multi-protocol storage workloads onto a single, comprehensive platform, which should please HPE and VAST Data, reassure Hitachi Vantara with its VSP One concept and Pure with its Enterprise DataCloud concept, but not so much Dell and IBM.

Its idea of the future state looks like this:

The remainder of the 24-page document goes into a lot more detail for the five areas in the table above. It includes a strategic roadmap timeline for storage out to 2029:

This is effectively a product and service development strategy for enterprise storage suppliers as well – unless they can convincingly tell Gartner-following customers that either Gartner is wrong or, in their case, special circumstances apply. Good luck with that.

Request a copy of Gartner’s 2026 storage “bible” here.