Once used mainly for secondary tier 2 and archival storage, object-based storage is increasingly being used as primary storage for tier 1 workloads. More than three-fourths of IT leaders surveyed by IDC believe object storage is ready to support their organization's leading IT initiatives, including data security, IoT and analytics of unstructured data.

While the role of object-based storage will remain strong in secondary storage, the vast majority of those surveyed view it as a mature technology that offers the scalability and flexibility their IT initiatives require. That's because an object storage implementation can, for example, improve data quality and unstructured data analysis. It can also support a wide variety of traditional, public cloud and private cloud platforms.

The ability to manage data across platforms and clouds is the most important feature enterprises desire when looking to adopt object-based storage. That is followed by multi-cloud tiering, SSD flash performance enhancements, file system capabilities, integrated intelligent data movement and custom metadata support.