Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

As enterprises scale AI initiatives from the core data center to the edge, many organizations are thwarted by weak data practices and fragmented systems. The attempt to use a one-size-fits-all architectural approach for workloads that have fundamentally different needs is no longer a solution. If your AI ambitions are outgrowing your storage: the solution isn’t just adding more capacity, but matching the right architecture to the right stage of the AI lifecycle.

Unaccounted data copies within non-production environments can make enterprises vulnerable to cyber theft. Non-production environments — which are often less secure than production environments — are treasure troves for hackers seeking to steal customer data. How many copies of test data are currently floating around your organization’s non-production environments?

If you’re responsible for keeping storage reliable, secure, and cost-efficient, 2026 planning is shaping up to be uniquely challenging. A perfect storm of pressures like ongoing semiconductor constraints, concentrated manufacturing, and unprecedented AI-driven demand are reshaping day-to-day infrastructure operations. The challenges introduced by the global supply chain crunch, however, are especially risky.

Most enterprises have made the commitment to AI. They’ve approved the budgets, stood up the pilots, and named it a strategic priority. So why are 95% of them getting zero return on $30–40 billion in GenAI investment? According to MIT research cited in Hitachi Vantara’s 2025 State of Data Infrastructure Global Report — which surveyed more than 1,200 IT leaders across 15 markets — the failure isn’t the model. It’s the infrastructure underneath it.

As organizations scale their AI initiatives from experimentation into production, CTOs face a pivotal architectural challenge as storage emerges as one of the most common—and most expensive—constraints. While organizations continue to invest aggressively in GPU compute, studies consistently show that infrastructure inefficiencies outside the GPU account for the majority of wasted AI spend.

Hybrid cloud adoption isn’t slowing down any time soon, with worldwide IT spending expected to total $6.08 trillion in 2026 — an increase of 9.8% from 2025.

It’s 8:00 AM on a Monday. A critical business unit just launched a new customer-facing application, and traffic is surging. The infrastructure team gets the call: “We need more storage—immediately.” In the past, this would trigger a scramble—manual provisioning, configuration errors, delays. But today, the team opens their CI/CD pipeline, runs a Terraform script, and within minutes, a secure, scalable storage cluster is live in the cloud. No panic. No bottlenecks.