2026 Trends in Applied Infrastructure & DevOps
In 2026, AI will mature into agentic operations and human-supervised development, driven by hybrid infrastructure, custom silicon and open governance for industrial-grade enterprise reliability.
Biography
Henry Baltazar is research director of the 451 Research Storage channel within S&P Global Market Intelligence, with a focus on data storage. In his current role, Henry analyzes the market trends around environmental, social and governance (ESG) storage challenges, infrastructure modernization and resiliency. He publishes reports on trends in data storage, disaster recovery and hybrid cloud. He is often cited as a subject expert by publications such as MIT Technology Review, Forbes and TechTarget. Henry arrived at S&P Global Market Intelligence through its 2019 acquisition of 451 Research, where he began working as an analyst in August 2006. After spending three years running the storage research practice at Forrester, he returned to 451 Research in 2015 to fill the research director role and lead the storage practice. Henry graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in environmental sciences.
Recent Research from Henry Baltazar
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2026 Trends in Cloud and Cloud Native
The cloud sector continues to transform as hyperscalers, managed service providers, global systems integrators, hardware vendors and independent software vendors advance overlapping visions for IT infrastructure and application modernization enabled by automation and powered by the disruptive promise of generative AI. Developer services, integration, automation and business processes take on new importance as modern enterprise IT environments mature and we transition from the "era of cloud" to the "era of AI."
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ESG influence continues to wane despite consumption and carbon emission challenges – Highlights from VotE: Storage
Although nearly a third of respondents claim that ESG goals have become less important to their organization, the vast majority remain focused on reducing the power and rack space consumption of their storage assets, while also reducing their CO2 emissions. To optimize their storage infrastructures, organizations are expanding their use of all-flash storage and moving idle content to archives to free up primary storage resources.
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Survey Data Hub – Voice of the Enterprise: Storage, ESG 2025
Voice of the Enterprise: Storage provides you with actionable data and insight to understand the key dynamics driving the information technology market.
Combining 451 Research’s industry-leading analysis with a proprietary global panel of IT decision-makers, Voice of the Enterprise: Storage, ESG looks into the environmental, social and governance trends and major opportunities for enterprises, IT vendors, suppliers and investors.
Two-part online surveys were conducted between September and October 2025. The main survey consists of ~350 respondents. The margin of error for top-line statistics is +/- 5 points at the 95% confidence level.
Reports
Although nearly a third of respondents claim that ESG goals have become less important to their organization, the vast majority remain focused on reducing the power and rack space consumption of their storage assets, while also reducing their CO2 emissions. To optimize their storage infrastructures, organizations are expanding their use of all-flash storage and moving idle content to archives to free up primary storage resources.
Data files
Crosstabs (Excel tables | Download link in sidebar to the right) – Crosstabs of complete worldwide and regional survey results datasets, including key metrics and segmentation.
Charts and Figures (PowerPoint charts | Navigate charts in sidebar to the left | Download link in sidebar to the right) – PowerPoint slide deck of complete top-line survey results in charts and figures.
Data Insights Deck (PowerPoint charts | Coming soon) – PowerPoint slide deck of advanced charts supporting deeper analysis and insight.
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NetApp AFX disaggregated storage takes on data-intensive AI workloads
At the NetApp Insight 2025 conference, the vendor launched the NetApp AFX system, which is designed for data-intensive AI workloads. This follows the recent StorageGRID 12.0 update, which introduced S3 Bucket Branches for versioning as well as a new native caching capability.
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MinIO unveils AIStor Tables, adds AIPods integrated hardware
Tables is an extension of the vendor's AIStor platform that integrates an Apache Iceberg catalog directly with the object storage layer. The move reflects MinIO's continuing transition from a general-purpose, open-source object storage specialist toward a broader data infrastructure provider.
More research from Henry Baltazar
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