Wasabi 2024 Global Cloud Storage Index Finds Expansion of Cloud Storage Adoption in Education

Colleges and universities worldwide are increasing their public cloud infrastructure and storage usage and budgets to keep pace with the needs of their institutions. The Wasabi 2024 Global Cloud Storage Index found that 95% of respondents from the education sector plan to increase public cloud storage budgets over the next year.

Not only is this rate impressively high, it is also five percentage points higher compared to the overall survey average of 90%. Furthermore, 92% of education respondents expect the amount of data their organisation stores in the public cloud to increase over the next year.

The Wasabi 2024 Global Cloud Storage Index indicates this expanding use of public cloud infrastructure and storage solutions within the education sector is driven by a mix of both IT initiatives and business initiatives, such as modern application development programs, infrastructure and data migrations, digital transformation programs, and cloud modernisation initiatives.

The 2024 Wasabi Global Cloud Storage Index, commissioned by Wasabi Technologies and conducted by Vanson Bourne, included 128 respondents from the education sector and asked questions specific to respondents’ use of cloud storage services, including benefits and challenges and the factors influencing consideration around solution and vendor adoption.

The study surveyed 1,200 IT decision-makers who had at least some involvement in or responsibility for public cloud storage purchases in their organisation. Researtch for the Wasabi 2024 Global Cloud Storage Index took place from November to December 2023 and included organisations with more than 100 employees across all public and private sectors. All interviews were conducted using a rigorous multi-level screening process to ensure that only suitable candidates were given the opportunity to participate.

“The education sector has some of the most complex, demanding, and mission-critical cloud infrastructure deployments we see among Wasabi’s customer base,” said Andrew Smith, Senior Manager of Strategy and Market Intelligence at Wasabi Technologies, about the findings of the Wasabi 2024 Global Cloud Storage Index.

He added: “It’s no wonder that almost half of education respondents in this year’s Global Cloud Storage Index classified their organisation as cloud-first—meaning they prioritise the adoption of cloud IT services over alternatives requiring owned or on-premises solution deployment. Wasabi is a key ingredient in this approach, helping IT decision-makers in the education sector power their initiatives with affordable, high-performance, and secure cloud storage. Most importantly, this ultimately helps organisations to continue innovating and delivering the best experience to their students.”

Wasabi 2024 Global Cloud Storage Index: Almost Half of Cloud Storage Spending Goes to Data Usage and Access Fees

When it comes to cloud storage fees, the education sector is slightly worse off than other industries, with 49% of cloud storage bills dedicated to data access and usage fees like API operations and egress fees (compared to 47% across the total survey average).

In many cases, the result of these fees is budget overruns and excessive spending on cloud storage. 52% of education respondents exceeded their intended cloud storage budget in 2023, primarily because of actual data/ storage usage and growth was higher than forecast. Data operations fees (cross-region replication, object tagging, transfer acceleration) were also higher than expected, along with cloud providers that increased the list price of the storage service.

Sustainability Is the No. 1 Consideration When Choosing a Cloud Storage Provider

Looking at the global average, sustainability was ranked as the third most important consideration when choosing a vendor. However, among education respondents, this choice elevated to no. 1, according to the Wasabi 2024 Global Cloud Storage Index. This is a clear indication of the sector’s growing commitment to ESG initiatives.

The second most important consideration among education respondents is integration with specific third-party apps/platforms (e.g., Veeam for backup, Snowflake for data lakes, etc.). The third most important consideration among education respondents is native data protection, security, and compliance features/ capabilities (e.g., immutability, backup, replication, disaster recovery).

All Education Respondents Are Already Using or Plan to Use AI/ML Solutions

No surprises here, all survey respondents from the education sector say they plan to adopt or are already implementing Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) solutions and services. However, respondents to the Wasabi 2024 Global Cloud Storage Index also cite new challenges associated with AI/ML solution adoption, including difficulty storing data across a wider range of locations (e.g., core, edge, cloud), managing new and increasing storage migration requirements, and meeting new storage performance, access, and latency requirements.

• Operational improvements and efficiencies are the top priority driving adoption/planned adoption of AI/ML solutions.
• 54% of education respondents say they have implemented Generative AI solutions, making it the no. 1 use case.
• 49% say they have implemented AI/ML solutions for speech recognition and/or natural language processing.

Education Respondents Are Highly Satisfied with Their Cloud Storage Solutions

This year Wasabi asked respondents about their level of satisfaction with their cloud object storage service(s). Impressively, 95% of education respondents said they are “satisfied” with their service. This was also five percentage points higher than the global survey average.

More insight into the Wasabi 2024 Global Cloud Storage Index education findings can be found here.

To read the Wasabi 2024 Global Cloud Storage Index in its entirety, please visit here.