To spur innovation, businesses all around the globe are allocating larger budgets and using more public cloud storage, according to study conducted by market research agency Vanson Bourne and commissioned by Wasabi Technologies. Of course, Wasabi is preaching to its own parish here, but we think the research numbers are interesting enough to mention. A startling 93% of businesses want to increase their public cloud storage capacity in 2024, according to the Wasabi Global Cloud Storage Index for 2024.
From the study conducted last year, this rate of capacity growth is up 9 points (84% projected an increase).
“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.”
The industry is still plagued by high public cloud storage costs, according to the Wasabi Global Cloud Storage Index, even if cloud storage budgets are rising as more businesses go to the cloud.
- Over 50% of those surveyed claim to have spent more on public cloud storage than they had planned. Using more storage than anticipated (42%) and moving more applications and data to the cloud than anticipated (45%) are the two biggest causes of budget overrun.
- With 95% of C-level respondents indicating they anticipate an increase in cloud storage budgets in 2024, 90% of respondents expect their budgets for cloud storage to rise in 2024, up from 84% in 2023, partly because of additional needs for data protection, backup, and recovery.
- Data and use costs (such as API calls, operations, egress, retrieval, etc.) account for 47% of cloud storage pricing on average. This finding is consistent with findings from the previous year and shows that businesses are still having trouble with complicated and major fee charges.
- Two points more than the average of 52% from the previous year, 53% of respondents said they spent more than they had planned to for cloud object storage in 2023.
- Interestingly, 72% of new cloud storage adopters – those who signed up for services in 2022 and 2023 – said they went over budget. They gave three primary reasons for this overspending: unexpected egress prices, high storage utilization and growth, and API call fees.
Cold vs. Hot Data Storage
When it comes to the adoption of IT services, more than 40% of respondents say their company is ‘cloud-first,’ while a large portion of their stored data is regarded as ‘hot.’
- The percentage of respondents that self-identified as ‘cloud-first’ in 2024 (42%) was higher than in 2023, indicating a persistent trend towards the usage of cloud IT services for infrastructure solutions, including storage.
- On a scale from ‘cold’ to ‘hot,’ respondents assessed the performance requirements for cloud object storage. On average, just 18% of cloud object storage data falls into the ‘cold’ category. As more active data, the remaining 82% of cloud object storage is categorized as hot, warm, or cold. This allocation would reflect the need for enterprises to do more with their data as well as the expanding use of object storage across a broad spectrum of corporate applications.
AI and ML Workloads
The implementation of AI and ML workloads would stimulate the upgrade of infrastructure in order to support data sprawl across new environments.
- In 2024, 99% of participants intend to use or have already begun using AI/ML products and services.
- According to 49% of respondents, storing data across a larger variety of places (such as edge, core, and cloud) would become more difficult if AI/ML workload adoption occurs.
- Generative AI accounts for the majority of respondents’ current or anticipated use of AI workloads (49%), with AI/ML solutions for security and compliance coming in second (45%) and product design third (39%).
- This year, the Wasabi Cloud Storage Index particularly inquired about storage-related issues and adoption problems for AI/ML solutions. According to the survey, 97% of respondents said their company had storage-related issues linked to AI/ML.
- The need for improved data security and compliance capabilities (43%), new or expanded needs for data movement/migration (44%) and hybrid cloud and multicloud (45%), and the demand to store data across a broader variety of locations (49%) are the top three challenges confronting companies.
“The 2024 Global Cloud Storage Index shows organizations are vastly underestimating the cost of egress and API call fees,” said David Friend, Co-Founder and CEO, Wasabi Technologies. “Our findings show almost half of the average cloud storage bill is attributed to various data access and usage fees. We believe this unfavorable mix practically doubles total cloud storage costs. Even more concerning is the impact of these fee structures as nearly every organization expects to store and do more with their data. There is evidence that some of this growth is being driven by the need to train AI models.”
1,200 IT decision-makers who were in charge of or involved in the procurement of public cloud storage for their company were surveyed for the research. In November and December of 2023, firms with over 100 workers from both the public and commercial sectors participated in the study. A stringent multi-tier screening procedure was used for every interview to guarantee that only qualified applicants were had the chance to take part.
