Test your knowledge of object storage usage in the enterprise

The last few years have seen object storage rise in prominence in the enterprise. It's been the predominant storage for the cloud, as well as a long-term backup and archiving on-premises option. Now object storage usage is starting to support applications that generate large amounts of unstructured data, like AI, machine learning and big data analytics.

Unstructured data growth is key to the future use of object storage in the enterprise. By 2024, large enterprises will triple the unstructured data they have stored as file and object storage on premises, at the edge and in the public cloud from the 2020 levels, according to Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage. Also, end users are seeing their unstructured data growing between 30% and 60% year over year, the research firm reported.

So, what does that mean for object storage use? It will be in demand more than ever. According to an IDC survey late last year, 80% of the 1,000 IT decision-makers surveyed said object storage can support their top IT initiatives. It's the top choice for long-term storage of unstructured data, IDC said, and it's rapidly moving to supporting tier 1 workloads.

Do you have a full understanding of where object storage fits into the overall storage picture? When is object storage use better than file or block storage? What are its advantages and challenges? Take our quiz to find out if you're truly up to speed on object storage's emerging new role in the enterprise.