BUSINESS

Introducing the Wasabi 2023 Cloud Storage Index

Tue Jan 24 2023By Andrew Smith

In late 2022, Wasabi commissioned a survey with global technology research firm, Vanson Bourne, to better understand enterprise cloud storage market trends and developments. We analyzed survey results from 1,000 IT decision-makers worldwide to provide insight into how your peers are thinking about their cloud storage strategy and the challenges they face.

I’ve shared some of our key findings below, and there are even more insights in our 2023 Cloud Storage Index Executive Summary Report. The summary is designed to be the first in a series of reports, which will make up the complete Cloud Storage Index. The full survey spans all major geographic regions (North America, EMEA, APAC), ten industry verticals, and organization sizes from small business to large enterprises. Respondents include IT decision makers and lines of business managers, all the way up to the C-suite, so we’re just scratching the surface on the information we can share or the various ways we can cut this data.

Throughout the year, we will releasing the results along with our analysis and key findings across the various respondent subsets. In the meantime, I would like to share some of our most interesting top-level findings, and our objectives for launching this survey in the first place.

Why the Cloud Storage Index matters

Independent market research is extremely valuable. From a vendor standpoint, it helps us to identify market trends and buyer sentiment, and to plan for potential future developments. This intelligence can be fed into everything from product development and service and support to sales and marketing. From a buyer standpoint, market research gives an outside-in perspective on the benefits, challenges, and strategies relevant to a specific geography or industry as it relates to a technology or service. It helps technology buyers understand the buying patterns and decisions that are being made by their peers.

We designed the Cloud Storage Index to deliver insightful data for both of these constituencies, while also shining a light on some of the lesser known areas of the cloud storage market. These include challenges with data migration, security, compliance, storage budgeting, and billing. The cloud infrastructure services market is a well established, multibillion-dollar industry. And while storage services account for approximately half of this total market from a revenue perspective, it isn’t always in the spotlight. The Cloud Storage Index aims to fill this gap, providing independent, authoritative data points and analysis to help inform key questions about trends in this specific industry segment.

Key findings from Wasabi’s Cloud Storage Index

Cloud storage capacity and spending are set to expand in 2023: Our finding that stored capacity in the cloud will grow in 2023 is likely no surprise. But the fact that 84% of respondents expect their public cloud storage budget to increase in 2023 is significant – especially given current macroeconomic conditions. Not only are enterprises planning to store more data, they are willing to spend more to do it.
Organizations continue to embrace “cloud” infrastructure over traditional systems. We asked respondents to describe their organization’s approach to IT services adoption, and 41% identified themselves as “cloud first,” prioritizing cloud IT services adoption over any alternative requiring owned or on-premises infrastructure. This approach is having a tangible impact on the cloud storage market, with 39% of respondents, on average, indicating that their storage install base is in the public cloud. This is expected to increase to 43% over the next 12 months.
The cloud storage market is plagued by inefficient budgeting and over-spending. Our data sheds light on an unfortunate truth: storage services fees account for 48% of total cloud storage bills on average. These fees can be notoriously difficult to predict. As a result, they are a major reason why more than half (52%) of organizations we surveyed said that they exceeded their budgeted spending on cloud storage services in 2022. When we asked respondents for the reasons why their organizations exceeded budget expectations, three out of the top four reasons were fee-related.
Performance, resilience, and scale drive cloud storage migrations: Almost 90% of respondents we surveyed indicated that they had migrated storage from on premises to the public cloud within the last year. Interestingly, the top reasons driving migration were not cost related. Instead, users were spurred by the need for better infrastructure resilience, durability, and scalability. When we looked at just C-level respondents, performance was the #1 reason for migrating to the cloud. This data supports changing industry dynamics that we’ve been following over the past several years: cloud storage migration isn’t always driven by cost. Buyers see a range of valuable benefits that go beyond immediate cost reduction. They’re factoring things like performance and security benefits into their assessment of value and long-term ROI of cloud services.

Survey methodology

Researcher Vanson Bourne surveyed 1,000 IT decision makers around the world. The respondent set represents all major geographies, over ten individual industries, and a wide range of company sizes from SMB to large enterprise. Respondents chosen to participate had to be involved in their organization’s cloud storage purchases. Respondents were asked about a range of cloud storage topics, from the amount of data they store and their expectations around budget and growth, to the various benefits and challenges they face as they expand their usage of multiple cloud providers and address increasingly stringent security, compliance, and regulatory requirements.

Feel free to ask questions

This is the first iteration of Wasabi’s Cloud Storage Index, and we’re eager to hear your feedback. If you have questions about the survey, or comments on future segmentations of the data or what might be valuable for us to ask about next year, feel free to contact me at strategy@wasabi.com