South African organisations are entering a new era of data-driven business, with AI, private cloud and cyber resilience reshaping what they need from their IT infrastructure.
Data is no longer simply something businesses need to store. It is increasingly the foundation for artificial intelligence, modern applications, private cloud environments and data-driven decision-making.
Against this backdrop, Dell Technologies closed the first quarter of 2026 as the world’s No. 1 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 broader enterprise storage market grew 22.7% during the same period.
For South African businesses, the significance goes beyond the ranking itself. As organisations look to modernise their technology environments, they need infrastructure that can support growing data volumes and increasingly demanding workloads, while balancing performance, cost, security and complexity.
“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.
Three priorities are reshaping enterprise storage
Across industries, three priorities are increasingly influencing infrastructure decisions: private cloud, AI and cyber resilience.
For South African businesses, these trends are particularly relevant as organisations look to make technology investments that can support both immediate operational requirements and longer-term growth.
Private cloud without sacrificing flexibility
Many organisations want the flexibility associated with cloud while retaining greater control over where their data and workloads reside.
Dell’s private cloud approach is designed to give organisations greater choice in how they build and manage these environments. The Dell Automation Platform supports cloud environments from Broadcom, Microsoft, Nutanix and Red Hat, while compute and storage can scale independently.
At the storage layer, PowerStore supports block, file, virtual machine and container workloads on a single platform.
“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 Marc.
For organisations with existing technology investments, this flexibility can help support modernisation without requiring a complete replacement of their infrastructure.
Preparing enterprise data for AI
AI is also changing the conversation around storage.
The question is no longer simply how much data an organisation can store, but whether that data can be found, accessed, governed and put to work.
For South African businesses exploring AI, this is an important consideration. Much of the data required to support AI initiatives already exists within organisations – across documents, databases, applications and other systems.
Dell’s AI Data Platform is designed to help organisations connect data into governed pipelines, while PowerScale and ObjectScale provide the underlying storage foundation for AI-ready 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,” Marc explains.
This means AI investment increasingly needs to be considered alongside the underlying data infrastructure. Organisations need to understand where their data resides, how it is managed and whether their infrastructure can support the workloads AI will create.
Building cyber resilience into the infrastructure
As businesses become increasingly dependent on data, protecting that data becomes just as important as accessing it.
Cybersecurity is therefore moving beyond simply preventing attacks. Organisations also need to consider how quickly they can detect threats, isolate affected systems and recover critical data.
Dell PowerProtect One brings protection orchestration and protection storage together under a single control plane, while Dell 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 Marc.
For South African organisations, where operational disruption can have significant financial and reputational consequences, resilience is becoming a fundamental part of infrastructure planning.
From storage to a strategic foundation
The evolution of enterprise storage reflects a broader change in the role of IT infrastructure.
Storage is no longer simply a place where data sits. It is becoming part of the foundation that enables AI, supports flexible cloud strategies and helps organisations remain resilient in the face of growing cyber threats.
Dell Technologies’ No. 1 position in external enterprise storage highlights the growing demand for infrastructure that can support these changing requirements.
For South African IT leaders, the conversation is therefore moving beyond storage capacity to a broader question of what their infrastructure needs to enable next.
“As data becomes increasingly central to how businesses operate and compete, infrastructure becomes a strategic business decision. The organisations that can turn their data into insight, innovation and better business outcomes will be better positioned for what comes next,” Marc concludes.
