For years, the enterprise data strategy was simple: move everything to the cloud. Migrate the data lakes and the warehouses to the cloud, and then governance follows. It was a clean story — until it wasn't.

Today, some of the world's most sophisticated enterprises are telling us clearly: they cannot — and will not — move all of their data to the cloud. Leading semiconductor manufacturers are training models on engineering-classified datasets that must never leave their premises. Global trading firms sit on massive volumes of historical tick data where the economics of cloud egress make migration impossible. Tier-1 banks have adopted "Hybrid Forever" strategies, modernizing on-premises storage while maintaining strict data sovereignty. Major pharmaceutical companies run millions of daily drug experiments against petabyte-scale on-premises data estates subject to stringent regulatory controls.

These aren't edge cases. They represent a structural shift in how enterprises think about data: from "Migrate Everything" to "Govern Everything."

The signal is unmistakable. We have received requests from hundreds of customers explicitly requesting on-premises and hybrid storage connectivity to Unity Catalog. The Software-Defined Storage (SDS) market stands at hundreds of billions of dollars in 2026, and the enterprise partners who manage this estate — collectively holding more than 2 Zettabytes of data under management — are building with us.

Today, we are excited to announce the Databricks Software-Defined Storage (SDS) Ecosystem — a new partner category purpose-built to bring Databricks Intelligence Platform to enterprise data wherever it lives: on-premises, in private clouds, and at the edge environments. If you are an enterprise running petabytes of data on these platforms today, you no longer have to choose between your existing non-cloud storage infrastructure and Databricks AI.

At the heart of this ecosystem is OpenSharing, an open-source protocol for secure, governed data sharing. Our storage partners are implementing OpenSharing servers to expose their data estates directly to Databricks Serverless Compute. The path is simple: the storage partner stands up a OpenSharing endpoint, you connect it to Unity Catalog, and you instantly gain secure, governed access to your on-premise data in Databricks without data migration.