The 2026 Gartner® Market Guide for Hybrid Cloud Storage Recognizes Panzura

Storage Infrastructure Has Moved to the Center of AI Strategy and the Hybrid Cloud Platform Category Is Where the Enterprise Battle Will Be Won

Key Takeaways:

• From our perspective, Panzura's recognition as a Representative Vendor in the Gartner® Market Guide for Hybrid Cloud Storage reflects the maturity of the CloudFS platform, delivering a global namespace, intelligent edge caching, integrated threat detection, and governed AI data access across on-premises, edge, and cloud environments.

• Enterprise storage infrastructure has entered a new era where hybrid cloud platforms are no longer evaluated on capacity and cost, but on their ability to support AI workloads, distributed data access, and cyber resilience at production scale.

• For infrastructure leaders, the decisions made about hybrid cloud storage platforms today will shape an organization's ability to compete, protect data, and operate efficiently for the next five to ten years.

If you're evaluating how Panzura maps to Gartner's view of the evolving threat landscape, we've also been recognized as a Representative Vendor in the Gartner Market Guide for Cyberstorage — read about the report and our analysis here.

Panzura has been recognized as a Representative Vendor in the Gartner® Market Guide for Hybrid Cloud Storage¹. Panzura is listed under the Hybrid Cloud Platform technology sector, alongside providers who deliver full-stack storage and data services that span on-premises, edge, and public cloud environments.

From our perspective, appearing in this guide at this particular moment carries real weight. Gartner states that “Compatibility and integration with public cloud infrastructure, as well as support for AI-driven data workflows, are key criteria for selecting hybrid storage platforms.” We believe that statement encapsulates a fundamental change in enterprise priorities and that the conversation has moved decisively away from storage cost management and toward storage as an enabler of competitive capability.

Understanding Hybrid Cloud Storage and Why the Definition Has Expanded

The Gartner Market Guide offers a clear definition: “Gartner defines hybrid cloud storage as an enabler of seamless storage and data services across different deployment environments, including disparate data centers, co-locations, edge locations and public cloud infrastructure.” But the report goes further, with Gartner noting that these solutions are “rapidly evolving beyond traditional storage use cases, now offering advanced data services such as analytics, cyber resilience, life cycle management, and seamless data mobility across public cloud, edge, and on-premises environments to better support AI workloads.”

In our view, the expansion of that definition is the story. Hybrid cloud storage began as a way to extend capacity and consequently allowed simplified disaster recovery. It has become something considerably more consequential, serving as the connective tissue of AI-era enterprise infrastructure. Organizations that still think of hybrid cloud storage in terms of tiering cold data to object storage are operating with an outdated map.

The growth trajectory reflects this shift in scope. Gartner cites industry forecasts projecting the market to grow “from USD $80.1 billion in 2025 to USD $269.6 billion by 2035 at a 12.9% CAGR.” In our opinion, numbers at this scale do not represent incremental adoption, but rather they represent a category that is being redefined around a new set of enterprise requirements, with AI at the center.

The Geographic Center of Data Has Permanently Moved

Perhaps the most arresting observation in the Gartner report, in our view, is its direct challenge to decades of storage orthodoxy. Gartner states plainly: “In the modern AI-ready data services world, the data center is no longer the center of the data.”

The enterprise storage model of the past twenty years was built on a gravity assumption that data would be pulled toward central infrastructure for storage, processing, and protection. That assumption no longer holds. Gartner projects that “by 2029, more than 50% of enterprise-managed data will be created and processed outside the data center or cloud, which is a major increase from 27% in 2026.” In our view, this is a reconfiguration of where enterprise value is created, and it demands storage infrastructure designed from the outset for distributed data, not retrofitted to accommodate it.

Organizations moving fastest on this front have already abandoned one-way data movement. Gartner observes that “early adopters of hybrid cloud storage are using multidirectional synchronization of data between the edge, core data center and public cloud.” In our opinion, multidirectional synchronization is not merely a feature preference, but an architectural prerequisite for any organization that expects data to be as useful at the edge as it is in the core.

AI Is Redefining What Storage Infrastructure Must Do

Gartner is explicit about the connection between AI workloads and hybrid cloud storage requirements, stating that, “Hybrid cloud storage ensures seamless data access across on-premises and cloud environments, enabling efficient data preparation, integration, training and inference.” It scales with changing data demands, reduces latency, and provides the security and compliance AI workloads require.”

From our perspective, I&O leaders asked to enable AI initiatives should take special note of this statement. We believe the requirements Gartner describes, including seamless access, consistent performance, security, and compliance, are not features that can be bolted onto legacy storage infrastructure. They must be built in. AI pipelines fail, stall, or produce unreliable outputs when the data layer beneath them is fragmented, slow, or poorly governed.

Gartner reinforces the momentum behind this shift by citing conference survey data: “61% of respondents said enabling hybrid cloud infrastructure platforms is a reason for adopting distributed hybrid infrastructure.” As we see it, when nearly two-thirds of enterprise infrastructure leaders are citing hybrid platform enablement as a driver, the direction of the market is clear. Organizations that continue to operate storage in disconnected silos will face compounding disadvantages as AI workloads move from experimentation to production scale.

Nowhere is that security-and-compliance requirement sharper than when enterprise data is exposed to conversational AI. Microsoft 365 Copilot is only as safe as the permissions behind the data it reaches, and most approaches either flatten those permissions or rebuild them by hand. We believe this creates an over-exposure risk.

Panzura Nexus takes a different path. As the governed bridge between CloudFS data and Copilot, Panzura Nexus carries each file's existing access controls through intact. That means full permission fidelity, with no data lake to secure separately and no permissions to reconstruct. Copilot sees only what each user is already entitled to see. The result is the difference between an AI initiative that respects the security posture and one that possibly undermines it.

The Strategic Signal Within Priority Use Cases

The hybrid cloud storage market has many use cases. From our perspective, placing global data access and management alongside storage standardization as growth priorities is an instructive and important signal.

These are not point solutions for well-understood problems, rather they are platform-level requirements. Gartner describes global data access and management as addressing “the need for data management across hybrid cloud deployment scenarios.” Gartner also states that it requires the ability to “connect to a variety of underlying storage platforms to deliver visibility and operate with metadata to enable capabilities such as life cycle management, data insights, classifications, synchronization, migrations and cyber resilience.”

In our opinion, this description outlines what intelligent storage management looks like in practice, a platform that understands data across systems and makes it available, governable, and useful regardless of where it physically lives.

Gartner projects that “by 2029, 72% of heads of I&O will implement at least two hybrid cloud storage use cases, which is a significant increase from 33% in 2026.” In our view, this trajectory means that hybrid cloud storage is on a path from specialized capability to standard enterprise practice within the planning horizon of most infrastructure leaders reading this today.

Panzura CloudFS: Engineered for the Hybrid Cloud Platform Era

Panzura CloudFS is a globally distributed hybrid cloud file platform that unifies data across on-premises locations, private and public cloud infrastructure. Data held by the platform is never siloed, and every authorized user and application accesses the same unified data structure, regardless of physical or geographic distance from the data source.

In our view, the CloudFS architecture maps directly to the capabilities Gartner identifies as most consequential in this market. Gartner describes these services as including: “life cycle management, mobility, synchronization, orchestration, global access, edge caching, data insights, collaboration, backup, migration, cyber resilience, and disaster recovery.”

In our opinion, CloudFS delivers substantively across this spectrum, providing the global namespace, edge caching, and native file access at the core. CloudFS offers integrated data services capabilities for search and audit, and AI-powered threat detection and immutable snapshot resilience. Panzura Symphony delivers data mobility, orchestration, migration, and lifecycle management.

Capabilities That Define the Hybrid Cloud Platform Category

In our view, this report sets out a clear picture of what organizations should demand from a hybrid cloud storage platform. We believe CloudFS is built to meet those demands:

• Global namespace across all environments: CloudFS delivers a single, coherent file system across on-premises, edge, and cloud infrastructure — eliminating data fragmentation and ensuring consistent access for all users and workloads.

• Intelligent edge caching: CloudFS automatically caches active data at the edge based on access patterns, delivering LAN-speed performance without requiring manual data management or creating redundant copies.

• AI workload acceleration: CloudFS exposes governed file data natively via S3 alongside SMB/NFS, meaning RAG frameworks and AI pipelines connect directly to production data without ETL or staging steps, eliminating the preprocessing bottleneck that typically delays AI deployment.

• Integrated cyber resilience: Through integrated data protection and recovery capabilities, CloudFS delivers AI-powered behavioral threat detection, immutable snapshots, and automated incident response as a storage overlay.

• Disaster recovery and operational continuity: A recovery point objective (RPO) measured in seconds, combined with a single source of truth, mean that no single failure at any site can eliminate an organization’s ability to recover quickly.

• Consistent storage operations across deployments: A single software-defined platform deployable in any environment removes the operational overhead of managing incompatible storage systems at different locations.

The Practical Implication for Infrastructure Leaders

From where we stand, storage infrastructure leaders need to act with urgency, as the decisions being made about hybrid cloud storage platforms right now will determine an organization’s capacity to support AI workloads, protect distributed data, and operate efficiently at scale for the next five to ten years.

The Gartner recommendation to infrastructure leaders is direct: “Prioritize hybrid cloud storage solutions that offer cloud-native data access and are optimized to support AI-driven applications and data pipelines in the public cloud.” In our opinion, cloud-native data access and AI optimization are not future-state capabilities to be evaluated in the next procurement cycle. They are current requirements for any organization that has already committed to AI as a strategic priority.

We believe Panzura’s recognition as a Representative Vendor reflects the maturity and completeness of the CloudFS platform, which is built for data resilience and delivers on the future-focused intelligence requirements that define the category.

Explore More with the Following Resources

• Learn more about Panzura CloudFS — explore the global namespace architecture, AI workload acceleration, and hybrid cloud platform capabilities.

• Talk to an expert and see CloudFS in action. Find out how Panzura can help you cut costs, simplify file data management, and prepare for AI workflows.

• Inquire about the report at Gartner.com.

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[1] Gartner®, Market Guide for Hybrid Cloud Storage, Julia Palmer, Chandra Mukhyala, 11 March, 2026

Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

GARTNER GARTNER is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

• What is hybrid cloud storage?

  Hybrid cloud storage is an infrastructure model that delivers consistent storage and data services across on-premises data centers, edge locations, and public cloud environments simultaneously. Rather than treating cloud and on-premises storage as separate systems, hybrid cloud storage connects them into a unified platform — enabling data to be stored, accessed, governed, and moved wherever an organization's workloads require it.

• Why is hybrid cloud storage important for AI workloads?

  AI workloads — particularly model training and inference — require high-throughput, low-latency access to large datasets that are often distributed across multiple environments. Hybrid cloud storage ensures that data is accessible wherever compute runs, without introducing the latency or consistency problems that arise when data must be manually staged or copied between systems. It also enforces consistent governance and security policies across the full data pipeline, which is critical for maintaining model quality and regulatory compliance.

• What is a global namespace in hybrid cloud storage?

  A global namespace is a unified view of all files and data across an organization's storage environments — on-premises, edge, and cloud — presented as a single coherent file system. Users and applications access data through one consistent namespace regardless of where that data physically resides. This eliminates the need to know which storage system holds which data, removes the complexity of managing multiple namespace islands, and makes data instantly accessible to distributed teams and AI workloads without manual data movement.

• What are the most common use cases for hybrid cloud storage?

  Gartner identifies six primary use cases: disaster recovery and business continuity, bursting capacity to the cloud when on-premises storage reaches limits, bursting processing workloads to cloud compute, edge computing data transport and services, global data access and management across distributed environments, and storage standardization across multiple deployment locations. Of these, disaster recovery represents the most mature adoption, while global data access and storage standardization are the fastest-growing priorities as AI and distributed workloads drive new infrastructure requirements.

• How does hybrid cloud storage support data sovereignty and compliance?

  Hybrid cloud storage allows organizations to keep sensitive or regulated data on-premises or within specific geographic regions, while using public cloud infrastructure for less sensitive or scalable workloads. This separation of data by policy — rather than by storage system — means compliance requirements can be met without sacrificing the operational flexibility of cloud integration. It also gives I&O teams a single governance and audit framework that spans all environments, rather than requiring separate compliance controls for each storage tier.

• What is the difference between hybrid cloud storage and cloud backup?

  Cloud backup moves copies of data to the cloud for recovery purposes — it is a protection mechanism, not a production storage platform. Hybrid cloud storage, by contrast, serves active workloads: data is stored, processed, and accessed across on-premises and cloud environments as part of normal operations. Hybrid cloud storage includes backup and disaster recovery as capabilities, but also encompasses global data access, performance-sensitive AI workloads, edge data services, and lifecycle management — functions that cloud backup alone is not designed to deliver.

• What should enterprises evaluate when selecting a hybrid cloud storage platform?

  Key evaluation criteria include support for AI-driven data workflows and cloud-native access patterns; the ability to deliver a global namespace across on-premises, edge, and cloud environments; integrated data services such as lifecycle management, metadata intelligence, cyber resilience, and synchronization; compatibility with major public cloud providers; and operational simplicity — the ability to manage a unified platform rather than a collection of disconnected point products. Gartner recommends selecting providers based on their ability to deliver advanced services essential for AI workloads, including metadata insights, global access, multicloud support, and seamless data mobility.