Financial institutions are making data growth their top storage priority, but few are prioritizing the AI-ready infrastructure and stronger data foundations needed to manage that growth at scale, according to a new report from Hitachi Vantara, the data storage, infrastructure and hybrid cloud management subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd. (TSE: 6501). The research found that 35% of organizations cite managing data growth as a top data storage priority, the highest response across the survey, yet only 10% prioritize enabling AI-ready storage and data platforms and just 9% prioritize the implementation of centralized data hubs for governance, reporting, AI/ML and reuse.
Based on a survey of 100 financial services decision-makers across banking, payments and investment firms globally, the research points to a divided market still working to align storage investments with long-term data strategy. While managing data growth ranked highest, it was still only cited by slightly more than one-third of participants (35%), while other near-term priorities closely grouped around governance, accessibility and modernization.
Notably, the survey found that the second-highest priority cited was ensuring data sovereignty, regulatory compliance and policy-driven governance (30%). The findings show that governance and sovereignty requirements are already influencing how financial institutions prepare for an AI-driven future, including:
- 99% of respondents say data sovereignty concerns influence where they run AI workloads
- 19% report that data sovereignty concerns significantly limit AI workload scalability or performance
- When it comes to which factors are most important when looking at object storage, 65% cite cost or total cost of ownership. That’s nearly 20 percentage points higher than the next choice (data resilience and availability, selected by 46% of respondents).
“Financial institutions clearly recognize that data management is becoming more complex, but many are not yet fully addressing what their environments require,” said Octavian Tanase, chief product officer, Hitachi Vantara. “As data volumes grow, organizations need unified data platforms that can span block, file and object storage to reduce fragmentation, improve visibility and support consistent governance for the mission-critical data that financial institutions depend on. This includes unstructured data used for analytics and AI, as well as the mission-critical databases and transaction systems that support core operations. That activation depends on the data availability and resilience needed to keep information accessible, protected and ready for use.”