Members of the Active Archive Alliance recently shared their predictions for data management as it relates to active archives in 2026. These newly released predictions reveal a major shift: active archives are no longer a “nice-to-have” tier. They are becoming the architectural backbone that enables AI at scale.
Below is a list of the top 13 upcoming trends for your review:
Active archives will play a central role in ensuring high-value datasets remain instantly accessible. Organizations will increasingly adopt a combination of active archives, intelligent tiering, and hybrid cloud architectures to optimize storage utilization at scale. Tiering is necessary to group large datasets and assign them levels of importance and priority. An active archive serves this purpose well, as it allows data to be relegated to a lower tier while still being available rapidly should it be needed by the AI engine. Organizations that fail to modernize their storage strategies will risk higher costs, slower AI deployment, and diminished competitiveness in an increasingly data-driven world. – Eric Polet, Director of Product Marketing, Arcitecta
Tape for long-term storage
Driven by exponential data growth and the need for lower-cost, energy-efficient, long-term storage, tape is poised to become a cornerstone of active archival tiers within hybrid storage architectures. – Marc Steinhilber, CEO, BDT Media Automation GmbH
Active archives will require sophisticated data analytics
The industry hit the storage wall as we predicted last year – rising lead times, media and stock prices tell the story. Active archives require sophisticated data analytics, as archives evolve from data dumps to data sources. Data storage must be accessible, sustainable, and affordable to unleash the full potential of AI. – Martin Kunze, CMO and Co-Founder, Cerabyte
Managing data growth is becoming more than just a challenge with IT teams barely able to keep up with demands for performance storage
In the AI data-driven world of 2026 and beyond, IT teams will be compelled to strategically leverage active archiving. With intelligent data management, an active archive solution allows for automated movement of data, based on user defined policy, moving data from expensive, energy intensive performance storage to eco-friendly, economy storage tiers such as today’s modern automated tape systems. This frees up overwhelmed performance storage tiers while maintaining ease of access to always online active archive content. – Rich Gadomski, Dir. Channel Sales and New Business Development, FUJIFILM North America Corp., Data Storage Solutions
Modern object storage will expand to include long-term tape solutions
The explosion of Generative AI and increased demand for unstructured data retention is exceeding modern IT budget growth. Standardized object storage interfaces are making it easy to move data, but object storage was designed as a single tier utilizing hard disk drives. Tiering will become a standard requirement for active data object storage vendors. Modern object storage solutions will expand support to include tape and other long-term storage mediums as an object storage deep archive target, at a fraction of the cost of cloud archives. Cloud will continue to be part of the hybrid data protection strategy. The result will be lowered costs for organizations storing Petabytes of data. – Mark Hill, Business Line Executive Data Retention Infrastructure, IBM
AI as the “archivist’s assistant” for value extraction
The role of the active archive will fundamentally change from a secure ‘holding tank’ to a ‘Data Intelligence Sandbox.’ AI will move beyond just classification and indexing to provide more robust and useful search, automatically identifying and connecting data—such as linking a decades-old research document to a currently active patent—transforming long-tail archived data into a persistent, accessible “corporate memory” that drives net-new R&D and revenue either for that organization or by monetizing the data to offer other organizations. – Paul Luppino, Director, Global Digital Solutions, Iron Mountain
The evolution of cold storage
Cold storage solutions will evolve to provide near-instant access (within seconds) to archived data, making it truly “active” rather than dormant. – Pete Paisley, Owner, MagStor
The rise of geo-distributed active archives based on S3-to-tape technology
By 2026, the deployment of geo-distributed active archives leveraging modern tape libraries is expected to accelerate across enterprises and data center environments. This development is driven by sustained data growth, rising energy and storage costs, and growing demands for data resilience and regulatory compliance.
Advancements in tape system integration, such as S3 object storage compatibility, metadata-driven access, and seamless connection to cloud workflows, are transforming S3-to-Tape systems into geo-aware active archives. These systems enable cost-efficient, sustainable, and cyber-resilient data preservation across multiple geographic locations.
Consequently, S3-to-Tape solutions will play a pivotal role in shaping long-term, distributed data management architectures. – Thomas Thalmann, CEO, PoINT Software & Systems GmbH
Companies that adopt active data archive solutions will be driven not just by cost savings but by compounding pressures such as:
- Exponential growth in attack surfaces, vectors and points of entry
- Required recovery of minimum business operations without ransomware payment
- Regulatory enforcement that punishes non-compliance heavily
- Rising cost of infrastructure and energy
- Corporate sustainability mandates
- Increasing volumes of AI-derived data with long-term retention requirements
These forces will make active archives strategically essential. As the most modern and efficient long-term data storage architecture designed for AI-era complexities, active archives enable early adopters to gain competitive advantages through lower compliance risk, reduced long-term costs, faster audit response, and lessened environmental impact. – Rick Bump, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, SAVARTUS
AI meets its infrastructure reckoning
The race to scale artificial intelligence will collide head-on with the physical limits of power, space, and sustainability. The world’s data centers—already consuming nearly 5% of global electricity—will face unprecedented pressure as exabyte-scale datasets multiply and GPU-driven workloads demand 24/7 throughput. The winners in this next phase won’t be those who build the biggest models, but those who build the smartest infrastructure. Expect a paradigm shift that incorporates the concept of active archives—energy-aware, cyber-resilient tiers where cold data moves from cloud and disk to modern tape systems that consume virtually no power at rest yet remain immediately accessible. This balance of intelligence and efficiency will define digital progress in 2026 and beyond: AI innovation sustained not by endless compute, but by thoughtful, scalable data preservation that keeps the lights on—literally. – Ted Oade, Director of Product Marketing, Spectra Logic
Cloud-based, active archives will no longer be thought of as secondary storage, they become an extension of primary storage. We expect demands for instant access to archived content to only increase – perhaps double or triple over the next few years – as adoption of AI, analytics, threat hunting, media workflows, and compliance accelerate. Data has gravity and cloud-based archives are a way to balance storage costs with demand for accessibility and we expect demand for more active “always available” storage to grow unabated. – George Hamilton, Director of Product Marketing, Wasabi
AI infrastructure will demand smarter access to all data
As AI workloads grow in complexity and scale, the way data centers manage and access storage is undergoing a fundamental shift. Traditional architectures are struggling to keep up with the demands of real-time analytics, model training, and inference. What’s emerging is a need for infrastructure that’s not only high-performance, but also flexible enough to span edge, core, and cloud environments. To support the full AI lifecycle, systems must deliver consistent performance while also enabling intelligent access to archival data, ensuring that even historical information can be leveraged efficiently and meaningfully. – Scott Hamilton, Senior Director, Product Management, Marketing & CX, Western Digital
Hybrid deployments for large active archives
The use of hybrid configurations that combine on-premises storage and cloud will continue to grow. This is especially the case for large active media archives where on-premises storage provides high performance and cost-effectiveness and, when combined with cloud object storage, the solution provides a high level of data protection. – Phil Storey, CEO, XenData
Like this:
Like Loading...
Related
This entry was posted on November 21, 2025 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Active Archive Alliance 2026 Predictions
Members of the Active Archive Alliance recently shared their predictions for data management as it relates to active archives in 2026. These newly released predictions reveal a major shift: active archives are no longer a “nice-to-have” tier. They are becoming the architectural backbone that enables AI at scale.
Below is a list of the top 13 upcoming trends for your review:
Active archives will play a central role in ensuring high-value datasets remain instantly accessible. Organizations will increasingly adopt a combination of active archives, intelligent tiering, and hybrid cloud architectures to optimize storage utilization at scale. Tiering is necessary to group large datasets and assign them levels of importance and priority. An active archive serves this purpose well, as it allows data to be relegated to a lower tier while still being available rapidly should it be needed by the AI engine. Organizations that fail to modernize their storage strategies will risk higher costs, slower AI deployment, and diminished competitiveness in an increasingly data-driven world. – Eric Polet, Director of Product Marketing, Arcitecta
Tape for long-term storage
Driven by exponential data growth and the need for lower-cost, energy-efficient, long-term storage, tape is poised to become a cornerstone of active archival tiers within hybrid storage architectures. – Marc Steinhilber, CEO, BDT Media Automation GmbH
Active archives will require sophisticated data analytics
The industry hit the storage wall as we predicted last year – rising lead times, media and stock prices tell the story. Active archives require sophisticated data analytics, as archives evolve from data dumps to data sources. Data storage must be accessible, sustainable, and affordable to unleash the full potential of AI. – Martin Kunze, CMO and Co-Founder, Cerabyte
Managing data growth is becoming more than just a challenge with IT teams barely able to keep up with demands for performance storage
In the AI data-driven world of 2026 and beyond, IT teams will be compelled to strategically leverage active archiving. With intelligent data management, an active archive solution allows for automated movement of data, based on user defined policy, moving data from expensive, energy intensive performance storage to eco-friendly, economy storage tiers such as today’s modern automated tape systems. This frees up overwhelmed performance storage tiers while maintaining ease of access to always online active archive content. – Rich Gadomski, Dir. Channel Sales and New Business Development, FUJIFILM North America Corp., Data Storage Solutions
Modern object storage will expand to include long-term tape solutions
The explosion of Generative AI and increased demand for unstructured data retention is exceeding modern IT budget growth. Standardized object storage interfaces are making it easy to move data, but object storage was designed as a single tier utilizing hard disk drives. Tiering will become a standard requirement for active data object storage vendors. Modern object storage solutions will expand support to include tape and other long-term storage mediums as an object storage deep archive target, at a fraction of the cost of cloud archives. Cloud will continue to be part of the hybrid data protection strategy. The result will be lowered costs for organizations storing Petabytes of data. – Mark Hill, Business Line Executive Data Retention Infrastructure, IBM
AI as the “archivist’s assistant” for value extraction
The role of the active archive will fundamentally change from a secure ‘holding tank’ to a ‘Data Intelligence Sandbox.’ AI will move beyond just classification and indexing to provide more robust and useful search, automatically identifying and connecting data—such as linking a decades-old research document to a currently active patent—transforming long-tail archived data into a persistent, accessible “corporate memory” that drives net-new R&D and revenue either for that organization or by monetizing the data to offer other organizations. – Paul Luppino, Director, Global Digital Solutions, Iron Mountain
The evolution of cold storage
Cold storage solutions will evolve to provide near-instant access (within seconds) to archived data, making it truly “active” rather than dormant. – Pete Paisley, Owner, MagStor
The rise of geo-distributed active archives based on S3-to-tape technology
By 2026, the deployment of geo-distributed active archives leveraging modern tape libraries is expected to accelerate across enterprises and data center environments. This development is driven by sustained data growth, rising energy and storage costs, and growing demands for data resilience and regulatory compliance.
Advancements in tape system integration, such as S3 object storage compatibility, metadata-driven access, and seamless connection to cloud workflows, are transforming S3-to-Tape systems into geo-aware active archives. These systems enable cost-efficient, sustainable, and cyber-resilient data preservation across multiple geographic locations.
Consequently, S3-to-Tape solutions will play a pivotal role in shaping long-term, distributed data management architectures. – Thomas Thalmann, CEO, PoINT Software & Systems GmbH
Companies that adopt active data archive solutions will be driven not just by cost savings but by compounding pressures such as:
These forces will make active archives strategically essential. As the most modern and efficient long-term data storage architecture designed for AI-era complexities, active archives enable early adopters to gain competitive advantages through lower compliance risk, reduced long-term costs, faster audit response, and lessened environmental impact. – Rick Bump, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, SAVARTUS
AI meets its infrastructure reckoning
The race to scale artificial intelligence will collide head-on with the physical limits of power, space, and sustainability. The world’s data centers—already consuming nearly 5% of global electricity—will face unprecedented pressure as exabyte-scale datasets multiply and GPU-driven workloads demand 24/7 throughput. The winners in this next phase won’t be those who build the biggest models, but those who build the smartest infrastructure. Expect a paradigm shift that incorporates the concept of active archives—energy-aware, cyber-resilient tiers where cold data moves from cloud and disk to modern tape systems that consume virtually no power at rest yet remain immediately accessible. This balance of intelligence and efficiency will define digital progress in 2026 and beyond: AI innovation sustained not by endless compute, but by thoughtful, scalable data preservation that keeps the lights on—literally. – Ted Oade, Director of Product Marketing, Spectra Logic
Cloud-based, active archives will no longer be thought of as secondary storage, they become an extension of primary storage. We expect demands for instant access to archived content to only increase – perhaps double or triple over the next few years – as adoption of AI, analytics, threat hunting, media workflows, and compliance accelerate. Data has gravity and cloud-based archives are a way to balance storage costs with demand for accessibility and we expect demand for more active “always available” storage to grow unabated. – George Hamilton, Director of Product Marketing, Wasabi
AI infrastructure will demand smarter access to all data
As AI workloads grow in complexity and scale, the way data centers manage and access storage is undergoing a fundamental shift. Traditional architectures are struggling to keep up with the demands of real-time analytics, model training, and inference. What’s emerging is a need for infrastructure that’s not only high-performance, but also flexible enough to span edge, core, and cloud environments. To support the full AI lifecycle, systems must deliver consistent performance while also enabling intelligent access to archival data, ensuring that even historical information can be leveraged efficiently and meaningfully. – Scott Hamilton, Senior Director, Product Management, Marketing & CX, Western Digital
Hybrid deployments for large active archives
The use of hybrid configurations that combine on-premises storage and cloud will continue to grow. This is especially the case for large active media archives where on-premises storage provides high performance and cost-effectiveness and, when combined with cloud object storage, the solution provides a high level of data protection. – Phil Storey, CEO, XenData
Share this:
Like this:
Related
This entry was posted on November 21, 2025 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.