HITS

Industrywide cloud storage data was lacking, so Wasabi decided to research the subject with Vanson Bourne, which conducted a survey for Wasabi last year, Drew Schlussel, Wasabi senior director of product marketing, said Feb. 28, during the webinar “Key Findings From Wasabi’s 2023 Cloud Storage Index.”

Wasabi analyzed survey results from 1,000 IT decision-makers globally to provide insight into how organizations are thinking about their cloud storage strategies and some of the critical challenges they face, according to Schlussel.

Schlussel, along with Andrew Smith, Wasabi senior manager, strategy and market intelligence, and Bill Hobbib, the firm’s CMO, discussed everything in the webinar from cloud storage budgets and billing complexities to security and compliance, and the challenges of migrating and managing data in a multicloud world.

Surveyed were decision-makers from multiple industries and companies “small and large,” Schlussel said.

One “key point about our sample is that everybody had to be somewhat involved in their organization’s cloud storage decision-making process,” Smith pointed out. “You couldn’t get in the door to the survey unless you said, “Yes, I know what’s going on and I’m involved.”

The “first big survey question [was] when did your organization first adopt public cloud storage?” Schlussel said. A whopping “65 percent of the adoption [was] before 2020,” he said, asking Hobbib if he was surprised by that figure as somebody who had been working in the cloud space for a while.

“It’s a little bit surprising in that you’ve got this massive adoption prior to 2020,” said Hobbib. But he said: “The other interesting thing to me that it says is there were paradigms and ways in which people purchased and business models that were adopted before 2020, which was the best way that people could do it. That’s the way we’ve been taught to adopt and the world changes quickly. So it also says, for those who adopted them, there may be new learnings from our survey that can enlighten them in the path forward. But it is very surprising to see such a steep bell curve before that. Oftentimes you see them a little more gradual and that this one has gone so high so quickly is, I think, a testimony to the way in which people see the value of public cloud storage.”

Playing a significant role in the adoption of the cloud was the pandemic, according to Schlussel, noting: “The reality is COVID triggered some significant adoption as well, whether it was planned or unplanned.”

Smith pointed out that, for the survey: “We definitely got a good cohort of those kind of what I would [call] COVID adopters, those who started coming into the market in 2020, 20 21. We had a couple of strays in 2022. They were fresh into their adoption and then they were able to answer the survey.”

Meanwhile, “when we think about how people answer questions, it’s always really interesting to be able to look at this from the standpoint of maturity and say: “Well, how did those COVID adopters answer this question versus someone who’s adopted since 2015,” Smith said. “What are those differences in terms of how good are they at managing budget? How impactful or painful are fees to them? Are there areas where mature buyers struggle less than new buyers? So having this type of granularity within our sample is great because we can go back and try to dig into all those details.”

There are also “entire industries, like video surveillance, hence our recent launch of the Wasabi Surveillance Cloud, that are just scratching the surface of cloud storage … adoption or just that industry that we’re expecting to see,” Schlussel said.