Although enterprises in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) require high-performance storage to support critical applications, almost a quarter have no plans to adopt flash technologies.
This is according to NetApp's recent EMEA Flash Survey of 3 000 IT decision-makers, conducted by Opinion Matters.
The study says almost half (46%) of respondents agreed that within their businesses, there is a need for high-performance storage technologies like flash.
This is mostly driven by payment processing, customer relations and business intelligence applications that require the most consistent levels of high performance to support business continuity, it adds.
However, there is still work to be done to educate business leaders on the true value of flash, says NetApp.
Over three quarters of respondents say they are knowledgeable enough to invest in flash - the knowledge is strongest among large businesses (28%), notes the study.
Despite this awareness, 28% of respondents from large EMEA businesses do not have flash, and have no plans to adopt it, it adds.
Meanwhile, among the region's small and medium businesses, 14% plan to adopt flash, with the largest potential for growth occurring among smaller businesses (17%).
Gary De Menezes, country manager for NetApp SA, says: "These findings show the appetite companies have for high-performance enterprise applications and that a heavy reliance is placed on them to serve customers and keep day-to-day operations running.
"Given the mission-critical nature of enterprise apps and high-performance storage to enterprises, it is surprising, but exciting, to see that there is still plenty of scope for further flash adoption."
Meanwhile, IDC says flash-based storage is still a young segment for many organisations. Companies are researching whether and how flash fits into their environments, it adds.
For vendors, it is a perfect time to bring their all-flash or hybrid products to market and be ready to capture the opportunity as adoption of flash storage and, in particular, all-flash arrays (AFAs), spreads from the early-adopter stage to mainstream, says IDC.
IDC expects AFAs to dominate the primary storage market spend by 2019, beginning a key subsequent phase of evolution in enterprise storage markets - that is, how secondary storage platforms will evolve to better meet the real-time needs of third platform computing.
Rupert Brazier, country manager SA at Pure Storage, says flash storage has provided the industry with the opportunity to move past the legacy of disk and into an era where the performance of storage in the data centre will be able to match the demands being placed on it by today's applications.
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