Tape is back on the forefront with new use cases and possibilities. The need for unlimited and cost-conscious storage for long-term retention has never been stronger, particularly for “cold” layers of storage in public and private clouds. Hardware, software, and product usability evolutions make tape solutions an attractive option for long-term archiving, ransomware remediation, and massive storage for media or media-like applications.

In order to gain insight into these trends, ESG surveyed 303 IT professionals at organizations in North America (US and Canada) personally responsible for or familiar with their organization’s data protection environment and strategy, including tape technology. The respondents’ organizations had to be current users of tape technology. This research aimed to understand the current state of enterprise tape deployments, uncover specific use cases (including vertical-specific ones), identify gaps, and highlight future expectations. Special attention was also paid to cloud use cases such as the usage of tape for long-term retention by hyperscalers, leveraging cloud-like services that use tape as a replacement for on-premises solutions and migration of tape to cloud.