Organizations worldwide are increasing public cloud storage use and budgets to accelerate innovation. According to the 2024 Wasabi Global Cloud Storage Index, an astounding 93% of organizations plan to grow their public cloud storage capacity in 2024. This rate of capacity increase is up 9 points from last year’s survey (which indicated 84% expected an increase). Commissioned by Wasabi Technologies, the hot cloud storage company, and conducted by Vanson Bourne, the Wasabi Global Cloud Storage Index uncovers the changing attitudes toward public cloud storage adoption, the factors that influence storage buying decisions, and the market’s top priorities when it comes to budget, capacity, vendor selection, billing, features and satisfaction.
Cloud storage budgets increase as more enterprises move to the cloud, but the market still suffers from expensive public cloud storage fees
- More than half of respondents say they exceeded their budgeted spend on public cloud storage. The main reasons for budget excess include using more storage than they planned (42%) and migrating more apps and data to the cloud than planned (45%)
- 90% of respondents expect their cloud storage budgets to increase in 2024, up from 84% in 2023, in part due to new data security, backup, and recovery requirements, with 95% of C-level respondents saying they expect cloud storage budgets to increase in 2024
- On average, 47% of cloud storage billing is allocated to data and usage fees (including API calls, operations, egress, retrieval, etc.), this finding aligns with last year’s results, indicating that organizations continue to struggle with complex and material fee charges
- 53% of respondents exceeded budgeted spend for cloud object storage in 2023, 2 points higher than the previous year’s average (52%)
- 72% of new cloud storage adopters, those who purchased services in 2022 and 2023, exceeded budget spend, and interestingly, these respondents cited high storage usage and growth, unanticipated egress fees and API call fees, as the three main reasons they exceeded budget
“Results from this year’s Wasabi Global Cloud Storage Index show cloud storage use isn’t slowing down, in fact, many organizations are asking more of their cloud storage services; improved security, low-latency storage for frequently accessed data, and tools to improve data management,” said Andrew Smith, senior manager of strategy and market intelligence at Wasabi Technologies, and a former IDC analyst. “The 2024 Cloud Storage Index also assessed cloud storage adoption, deployment and challenges associated with emerging AI/ML workloads, showing that while nearly all organizations are planning to adopt or are already implementing AI/ML apps and services, they are taking a low-risk approach by applying new technology to internal operations first. Also, coming as no surprise, Generative AI leads the AI/ML workload adoption pack with 49% of enterprises already implementing, or planning to implement this technology at their organization.”