Summary The object storage market is more active than ever. It is very popular with developers, and just about every IT organization is adopting it in one way or another. Not only is it common in the public cloud, especially with large organizations, but hybrid infrastructures and large on-premises installations are growing as well. There are several reasons for the increasing demand for this type of storage. Today, a growing number of applications need to store data safely and access it from everywhere, from multiple applications and devices concurrently. High-performance computing applications—like Big Data analytics and AI—are also big consumers of object storage. This means that the key characteristics of enterprise object stores have changed, with much more attention to performance, ease of deployment, security, federation capabilities, and multi-tenancy than in the past. In fact, users are taking advantage of their recent experience with the public cloud to build on-premises infrastructures that can support as many workloads as possible while keeping costs under control.