This has been the year of the Great Storage Squeeze, where everyone -- from consumers looking to upgrade to the latest phones and computers, to the largest enterprises planning to refresh their fleets of data center servers and storage systems -- has been impacted by unprecedented supply issues and the resulting significant price increases for the storage and memory components that are foundational to our digital lives.The root cause of the issue is well understood: Hyperscale cloud and frontier AI builders are buying up enormous quantities of flash and DRAM to support exploding, and increasingly data-intensive, AI use globally. But this fact has not made the impact of the squeeze on the average enterprise any less severe. Out of the blue, IT leaders worldwide have been forced to revisit, recalibrate and, in some cases, completely revise their infrastructure plans for this year and beyond. At a moment when there are significant additional pressures on IT leadership and operations -- from scaling their own AI initiatives, evolving their virtualization architectures, dealing with cyberthreats and generally managing global instability -- the timing could hardly have been worse. Storage shortage shrinks budgets, reshapes strategiesAt Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget, we wanted to understand how IT infrastructure leaders have been impacted by, and are dealing with, the storage squeeze. Why? It was clear from the outset that this was very different to the typical, cyclical, supply chain blip. With no rapid resolution likely, the impacts would extend beyond the short term. Given this, it seemed likely that many IT organizations would be forced into considering actions that extend beyond the immediate and into the strategic dimension.The results of that study have now been published, and I'm happy to share a few highlights:All organizations are impacted, many severely, and there's no immediate sign of improvement. The study revealed that price increases for memory and storage had moderately or severely impacted the current IT budgets for 87% of respondents. Most organizations said they are not expecting a significant improvement anytime soon, with 77% believing shortages will continue to have a significant or moderate impact over the next 12-18 months. Of concern is the fact that almost three-quarters of respondents (74%) said the shortage is slowing their ability to deploy AI infrastructure on-premises. Organizations are utilizing multiple strategies to "muddle through" in the first instance. Ever-resourceful IT leaders are resorting to multiple tactics to minimize the impact of rising prices and limited availability in the near term. Deferring noncritical purchases, taking spend from other lines in the IT budget, sweating existing storage assets for longer than planned and tapping into cloud-based storage as a temporary bridge are all popular choices for IT leaders looking to make near-term savings wherever they can. A renewed emphasis on efficiency is reshaping longer-term strategies. Eighty percent of respondents said they are now looking to improve the efficiency of their overall infrastructure. Storage efficiency technologies are not new, but in a time of significant price inflation, they have moved from nice-to-have to critical. Note that although this includes system-level efficiency capabilities, such as deduplication and compression, many respondents are evaluating alternative approaches altogether. Considerations here include advanced tiering technologies that enable data to flow seamlessly across different classes of media -- for example, from flash to HDD to cloud or even tape; offerings that consolidate multiple infrastructure types, such as primary, secondary and backup/archiving, into fewer physical systems; and software-defined storage options that enable customers to separate data and storage management from the underlying hardware. And for many, the squeeze has only intensified their desire to move more of their environment to the public cloud. 74% of respondents said the shortage is slowing their ability to deploy AI infrastructure on-premises.A key theme emerging from the research is that the timing, magnitude and duration of the Great Storage Squeeze of 2026 have had a profound impact on many IT leaders. While doing their best to ameliorate a difficult situation in the short term, they also want to be better prepared if, or when, this happens again.As a result, longstanding assumptions about the underlying dynamics of the storage and memory market -- namely, that availability will always be plentiful, and that prices will always fall -- have been challenged, indeed reversed. Accordingly, IT and infrastructure leaders are revisiting how they plan and build their data and storage environments, as well as other critical aspects, such as how they procure infrastructure, how they work with suppliers and so on.Finally, for now, the research highlighted one further nugget: This shortage has exposed a lack of deep understanding about the nature of the actual data the typical enterprise stores. In a time of unprecedented price rises, the huge volumes of dark data that many organizations retain translate into a massive cost. It's also a huge, untapped opportunity and potential source of significant risk.I'll dive deeper into our findings here in my next post. For now, though, the Great Storage Squeeze of 2026 certainly has made its mark and will continue to shape IT strategies for the foreseeable future.Simon Robinson is principal analyst covering infrastructure at Omdia.Omdia is a division of Informa TechTarget. Its analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.
