Colleges and universities worldwide are increasing their public cloud infrastructure and storage usage and budgets to keep pace with the needs of their institutions, according to research findings from Wasabi.
Commissioned by Wasabi, Vanson Bourne surveyed 1,200 IT decision makers who had at least some involvement in or responsibility for public cloud storage purchases in their organisation.
The research took place in November and December 2023. There were 128 respondents from the education sector.
Findings show 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.
Wasabi’s research 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. Examples include modern application development programs, infrastructure and data migrations, digital transformation programs, and cloud modernization initiatives.
“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, and a former IDC analyst.
“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 adoption of cloud IT services over alternatives requiring owned or on-premises solution deployment,” said Smith.
Almost half of cloud storage spending goes toward data usage and access fees. leading to budget overruns and excess spending.
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. More than half (52%) of education respondents exceeded their intended cloud storage budget in 2023, primarily because of actual data/ storage usage and growth was higher than forecasted, higher data operations fees (cross-region replication, object tagging, transfer acceleration) than expected, and cloud providers that increased the list price of the storage service.
Further, all of the education respondents plan to or are already implementing artificial intelligence/machine learning solutions.
However, respondents also cite new challenges associated with AI/ML solution adoption, including difficulty storing data across a wider range of locations (like 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.
