Findings from the third annual Wasabi Global Cloud Storage Index,
a survey of 1,600 decision-makers involved with the purchase of their
organization’s cloud object storage, show the material impact fee
charges have on businesses, with over half (56%) of organizations noting
their IT and business operations have been stifled by data egress and
access fees. Findings also reveal that storage fees in general (e.g.,
API calls, operations, data access) comprise nearly half (49%) of an
average user’s service bill, compared to actual stored capacity being
utilized. This year’s findings also show nearly all (99%) of
organizations globally have experienced data security-related benefits
from their use of public cloud storage, which is especially important in
today’s world of perpetual cyber threats. Conducted by Vanson Bourne,
the Global Cloud Storage Index surveyed C-level leadership and managers
at businesses across Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan,
the Netherlands, New Zealand, the UK, the United States and Singapore.
Cloud storage fees remain at significantly high levels
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Storage fee vs. capacity billing split (49% fees, 51% capacity) remains
consistent with findings from the past two years, unfortunately,
indicating little to no improvement in this billing mix for the market
overall. -
More than half (56%) of organizations say they experience IT or business
delays due to egress or other data access fees associated with moving
their organization’s data out of a public cloud environment. -
Cloud storage budget overruns are getting worse, with 62% of respondents
saying they exceeded budgeted spending in 2024, compared to 53% in
2023. -
Difficulty forecasting actual storage usage and app migration patterns;
coupled with higher fees for operations, are top reasons driving budget
excess, with 42% of organizations saying they migrated more applications
and data than originally anticipated, and 39% incurring higher data
operation fees than expected.
“Unfortunately, cloud storage remains an unpredictable expense for many
organizations, and fees associated with moving and accessing stored data
only exacerbate the nature of this unpredictability, ultimately
stalling business initiatives and slowing innovation,” said Andrew
Smith, director of strategy and market intelligence at Wasabi
Technologies, and a former IDC analyst. “It is imperative that
organizations eliminate and minimize these fee structures whenever
possible. Cloud object storage is only growing in capacity and usage, as
organizations are demanding more and doing more with their data, often
driven by new AI-based initiatives to explore use cases like GenAI or
agentic AI. Controlling costs associated with these new workloads will
be critical to long-term business success, and legacy fee structures and
billing models will only slow progress and punish innovators.”
Data security tops cloud storage decision-making checklist
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Cloud storage decision-makers pay particular attention to security
fundamentals like quality/robustness of encryption (32%), ransomware
protection capabilities (29%), and data durability and availability SLAs
(28%) when choosing a service/provider. -
Almost all (99%) respondents indicate their use of public cloud storage
has resulted in data security-related benefits for their organization –
with improved data security capabilities compared to their previous
environment, and improved ability to prevent and mitigate unplanned data
loss cited as top benefits. - Almost all (99%) of respondents say they recover data from their public cloud storage environment(s).
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However, surprisingly only 47% of respondents say they use object lock
(immutability) as part of their public cloud storage backup procedures
today. Despite this low rate of current utilization, the majority of
organizations not currently using (49%) plan to introduce object lock in
the next 1+ years. -
More than half (53%) of organizations recover data from their public
cloud storage environment on a weekly basis (every 1-2 weeks) for backup
purposes, including testing. This is a great indication of just how
active secondary storage use cases like data backup/recovery can be.
Cold storage access remains a significant challenge for many organizations
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Unfortunately, 98% of respondents using low-cost “cold” storage tiers
say they deal with data performance degradation and data access
penalties. Ultimately, this leads to one in five organizations saying
their business operations are negatively impacted by performance or data
access delays of cold storage tiers. -
Although many organizations think they will never access data stored in
ultra low-cost, deep archive tiers, the reality is most orgs (84%) say
they end up accessing data stored in cold tiers with performance
degradation/access penalties on a weekly or monthly basis. -
Why such frequent rates of access? We asked respondents about their more
“active” archive use cases in the public cloud, and 51% of
organizations say they leverage active archive storage for analytics and
data processing, while 49% say they use active archive storage for
security analytics and forensics. -
Finally, the analysis sheds light on an extremely important detail:
access requests for archive data are not always under the direct control
of the organization itself, complicating rates of unplanned access. The
top reasons cited for cold storage data access were regulatory and
compliance needs, and to respond to security events like
ransomware/malware. These are factors which can’t always be controlled
or even planned for, and part of the reason why estimating cold storage
data access patterns, and ultimately costs, can be difficult.
“The Wasabi Global Cloud Storage Index provides valuable data about how
organizations are using their cloud storage, and the pain points they
encounter,” said Dave Friend, founder and CEO at Wasabi Technologies.
“We use the Global Cloud Storage Index to align our development
priorities with the needs of our customers, and one of the interesting
findings in this most recent Index is that nearly all organizations
using cold or archive tiers experience data performance degradation in
addition to often-burdensome data retrieval costs. Another striking
statistic is that egress and other charges associated with the
hyperscalers’ cloud storage amount to almost half the total storage
costs. At Wasabi, we don’t charge for anything other than the storage
and we don’t complicate our users’ lives with multiple data storage
tiers. Instead, we provide one high-performance tier of hot cloud
storage with predictable pricing so businesses can focus on innovation
instead of trying to manage their cloud storage costs.”
