Cloud infrastructure has been instrumental in helping enterprises deal with the ever-increasing demands of storing and securing data. And we expect this trend to continue, in fact the global market analyst firm IDC predicts the public cloud object storage market will grow from $27 billion in 2023, to over $56 billion in 2028, representing a 15.5% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).  

As the preferred storage type for huge volumes of unstructured data, cloud object storage adoption continues to expand across all industries and a range of workloads, including backup, archive, and computer vision.  

Clearly, the use cases and market size for cloud object storage are both expanding. However, we still wanted to understand how our customers interpret both total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) when it comes to their utilization of cloud object storage and Wasabi.  

To gain unbiased insight into our value, we worked with IDC, who performed a series of in-depth interviews with Wasabi customers. You can find the results in IDC’s recent white paper on the Business Value of Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage. The analysis provides independent, third-party perspectives for key ROI and TCO metrics, based on actual Wasabi customer use cases.  

Let’s dive into three key results from the white paper that illustrate the real-world value we deliver to our customers.  

174% three-year return on investment 

Using a high-performance, low-cost cloud object storage can generate a high degree of value for your business. Using a specialized Business Value methodology, IDC calculated that the Wasabi customers they spoke to achieved annual average benefits of $647,000 (that’s $20,500 per 100TB of Wasabi storage) as a result of our hot cloud storage, leading to a 174%, nearly doubled, ROI over three years.  

How do Wasabi customers achieve this? 

1. By lowering their cost of running storage by over 53% on average, per year (equating to $214,000 in cost savings annually) 

2. By boosting the productivity of storage management and administration teams, who were 42.8% more efficient when using Wasabi 

3. By significantly accelerating the provisioning of new storage capacity (and eliminating any hardware costs associated with storage) 

4. By lowering the incidence of unplanned downtime, contributing to higher employee productivity and a 99% reduction in annual revenue loss associated with unplanned downtime The end result of these cost efficiency and improvement measures? Wasabi customers interviewed were able to achieve payback on their investment in 5 months, on average. 

85%+ improvement in storage efficiency 

With Wasabi, organizations were able to provision, deploy, and upgrade much quicker than before. IDC’s analysis shows that on average, it would cost an organization $1,100 to spin up a new storage instance and $770 to upgrade one instance for a combined total of $1,870.  

By contrast, deploying Wasabi only cost $135 per new instance and $140 per upgraded instance, for a combined total of $275—that's a 85.3% reduction in storage deployment cost! That improved efficiency figure is a testament to Wasabi’s ease of use and the ease with which customers can deploy new storage as soon as they need it, and at a price point that other storage providers can’t compete with.  

45% reduction in annual storage costs 

Cloud object storage can often lead to a reduction in storage costs, particularly when compared to premises-based storage. A significantly lower price-per-terabyte is just one piece of the overall TCO puzzle. Other factors like fees for data access, egress, and API calls all impact cloud storage billing.  

To accurately understand the post-adoption cost benefits of using Wasabi, IDC evaluated various impacts, beginning with a cost of storage comparison per 100TB. They found Wasabi customers saw a substantial reduction–45% less–in annual storage costs per 100TB.  

Furthermore, IDC noted that the biggest savings were realized in a scenario where organizations were researching the market, realizing a PoC with different cloud solutions, and comparing them to Wasabi’s price points. In these head-to-head evaluations, Wasabi came out 53% less expensive.  

Companies already using a cloud storage service who switched to Wasabi saw an average savings of 38%. Companies that switched from on-premises storage to Wasabi did even better, saving an average of 49%.  

Conclusion 

IDC’s findings go far deeper than one blog post can cover. Check out our webinar with IDC Analyst Dave McCarthy, which goes into more detail on some of the key findings, as well as IDC’s Business Value White Paper methodology.