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Data storage is an incessant need that can never be satiated. WD and SanDisk are two consumer brands from Western Digital that are at the top of this game and we speak to Khalid Wani, Director Sales, India, Western Digital.

- Khalid Wani

What are the major behavioural shifts you are seeing in data consumption by consumers?

The access of data that is available to consumers is far more superior than what they had in the past and that becomes a big turning point in this behavioural shift because when the consumer realises that the primary mobile device is capable of capturing content at a much higher quality than was possible earlier, the need to create content increases. This in turn drives the need for more storage as consumers rarely feel comfortable deleting content from their primary device. Hence, even though smartphones are sold from 64GB all the way to 512GB, when we launched our 1TB microSD card in India, we were sold out, can you believe it! Content creation is also part of many people’s livelihoods with apps like Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok which propagate data consumption and creation. Data is new oil, as a wise man once said and I like to think of Western Digital as the maker of barrels to store that oil! Also, in the past couple of years, the awareness to back up your data has increased exponentially as people realise that creating content takes a long time but losing it is very sudden and retrieving it is a long and expensive process.

What is the biggest challenge for creators these days?