Henry Baltazar is research director of the Storage channel at 451 Research from S&P Global Energy Horizons 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 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.
Organizations continue to favor cloud-based data protection, with fewer than a third maintaining an on-premises-only strategy. With outages continuing to be common and costly, data protection offerings must improve recovery speed. Many respondents say recovery requires significant effort, highlighting the need for enhanced disaster recovery testing.
Security incidents remain the top cause of outages, and nearly three-quarters of respondents still require moderate or significant effort to restore systems after a failure. Hybrid cloud continues to lead data protection deployments, and Microsoft 365 Copilot is the top software-as-a-service platform for backup. The study was fielded from March through April 2026.
Voice of the Enterprise: Storage provides you with actionable data and insight to understand the key dynamics driving the information technology market.
Combining industry-leading analysis with a proprietary global panel of IT decision-makers, Voice of the Enterprise: Storage, Disaster Recovery 2026 tracks the disruption occurring in the market and exposes the major opportunities for enterprises, IT vendors, suppliers and investors.
Two-part online surveys were conducted between March and April of 2026. The main survey consists of approximately 600 respondents. The margin of error for top-line statistics is +/- 5 points at the 95% confidence level.
Security-related outages drive resiliency evolution (Customer Voice report)
Organizations continue to favor cloud-based data protection, with fewer than a third maintaining an on-premises-only strategy. With outages continuing to be common and costly, data protection offerings must improve recovery speed. Many respondents say recovery requires significant effort, highlighting the need for enhanced disaster recovery testing.
Security threats persist, recovery remains a burden – Highlights from VotE: Storage (Spotlight)
Security incidents remain the top cause of outages, and nearly three-quarters of respondents still require moderate or significant effort to restore systems after a failure. Hybrid cloud continues to lead data protection deployments, and Microsoft 365 Copilot is the top software-as-a-service platform for backup. The study was fielded from March through April 2026.
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.
At Dell Technologies World 2026, the company announced a broad refresh of its data center portfolio, spanning storage, compute, data protection and private cloud, positioned around an end-to-end, validated infrastructure approach for AI and modern data center workloads.
The 451 Research team attended the annual Dell Technologies World conference, and analysts Brian Partridge, William Fellows, Henry Baltazar and Greg Macatee all joined host Eric Hanselman to share their perspectives on the conference, agentic AI advancement and the technology market overall.
As it contends in an increasingly competitive data protection arena, the vendor is looking to leverage its deep coverage of SaaS platforms as differentiation for its aiR offering — a natural-language query interface layered on top of its existing backup infrastructure.
New Alert Set
"My Alert"
Failed to Set Alert
"My Alert"
Here are a few tips for navigating our Research.
Quickly access any of our research and data products.
Browse the research & data that aligns with your specific interest.
Discover new and more flexible ways of finding relevant content.
Set notifications for the topics & companies you care about most.
Access any page in the dashboard from here.
Hand picked content for you and your team.
