Why enterprise storage is becoming a bigger priority for SA businesses
Dell Technologies closed the first quarter of 2026 as the world’s largest external enterprise storage vendor, with a 31.2% market share and 40.8% year-on-year growth, according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker. The wider enterprise storage market grew 22.7% during the same period.
For South African businesses, the shift is less about storage rankings and more about how infrastructure needs to evolve as data volumes and workloads increase.
“Storage has evolved significantly from simply being about capacity. Organisations are now looking for infrastructure that can support their AI ambitions, enable flexible cloud strategies and help them build greater resilience,” says Marc Layne, sales director of Dell Technologies South Africa.
Private cloud and infrastructure flexibility
Private cloud is one area changing how organisations approach infrastructure, as businesses look for the flexibility associated with cloud while retaining greater control over where their data and workloads reside.
Dell says its private cloud approach supports environments from Broadcom, Microsoft, Nutanix and Red Hat, while allowing compute and storage to scale independently.
At the storage layer, PowerStore supports block, file, virtual machine and container workloads on a single platform.
For businesses with existing technology investments, the ability to modernise incrementally can reduce the need to replace their entire infrastructure at once.
“Businesses don’t want to be locked into one approach as their requirements evolve. The ability to modernise at their own pace, while maintaining flexibility across their infrastructure, is becoming increasingly important,” says Layne.
AI puts new demands on business data
AI is also changing the role
For organisations exploring AI, having large amounts of data is only part of the equation. That data also needs to be accessible, governed and usable.
Much of the information businesses need for AI initiatives already exists across documents, databases, applications and other systems.
Dell’s AI Data Platform is designed to connect data into governed pipelines, while PowerScale and ObjectScale provide storage infrastructure for AI environments.
“AI is putting a different emphasis on data. It’s not enough for businesses to have vast amounts of information; they need to be able to access and use that data effectively, securely and responsibly,” says Layne.
This means organisations considering AI also need to assess where their data is stored, how it is managed and whether their infrastructure can handle the workloads created by these applications.
Resilience becomes part of storage strategy
As businesses become more dependent on data, protecting it and recovering it after a disruption are becoming increasingly important considerations.
Dell says PowerProtect One combines protection orchestration and protection storage under a single control plane, while Cyber Detect adds ransomware detection capabilities to PowerStore and PowerMax.
“Cyber resilience needs to be considered as part of the infrastructure strategy from the outset. Organisations need to know that their critical data can not only be protected, but recovered when they need it most,” says Layne.
The shift means enterprise storage is increasingly being considered as part of a broader infrastructure strategy rather than simply a question of how much data an organisation can hold.
For South African IT leaders, the focus is therefore moving towards whether their infrastructure can support the next stage of their businesses, including AI workloads, cloud strategies and the need to recover from cyber incidents.
