Education sector to boost public cloud budgets as sustainability leads
Colleges and universities around the world are set to increase their investment in public cloud storage in the coming year as highlighted in the recently published Wasabi Global Cloud Storage Index.
The Wasabi 2024 Global Cloud Storage Index revealed that 95% of respondents from the education sector plan to increase their budgets for public cloud storage over the next 12 months. This figure stands five percentage points higher than the overall survey average of 90%, reflecting a clear trend towards greater cloud adoption in education. Additionally, 92% of education sector respondents expect the amount of data they store in the public cloud to rise over the next year.
The survey, which was commissioned by Wasabi Technologies and conducted by research firm Vanson Bourne, included 128 participants from the education sector. The research explored topics such as cloud storage benefits and challenges, and the factors influencing the selection of storage solutions and vendors.
Drivers of cloud adoption
According to the findings, the growth in public cloud storage usage within education is driven by both IT-focused and broader institutional initiatives. These include modern application development, infrastructure and data migrations, digital transformation efforts, and cloud modernisation programmes.
"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 organization as cloud-first – meaning they prioritize 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 organizations to continue innovating and delivering the best experience to their students."
Almost half of the cloud storage spending from education institutions is related to data usage and access fees, such as API operations and egress. The research showed that 49% of education sector cloud storage bills go towards these costs, which is slightly above the survey average of 47%.
Budget overruns were also commonplace. The report noted that 52% of education respondents exceeded their cloud storage budgets last year. This was attributed to higher than forecasted usage and storage growth, unexpected increases in data operation fees, and rises in the list prices of storage services by providers.
Priorities in provider selection
Sustainability emerged as the primary consideration for education sector organisations when selecting a cloud storage provider, ranking above all other factors. Across all sectors globally, sustainability was ranked third, indicating a particular emphasis on environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitments amongst education institutions.
The second most important factor for education respondents was integration with specific third-party applications and platforms, such as Veeam for backups or Snowflake for data lakes. Security and compliance features, including data protection and disaster recovery capabilities, were ranked as the third highest priority.
AI and machine learning adoption
The survey reported universal plans for the adoption or expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) solutions amongst education sector respondents. Respondents noted, however, that the adoption of AI and ML introduced new storage management challenges, including the need to store data across diverse locations, increased storage migration requirements, and requirements for improved storage performance and access latency.
Operational improvements and efficiency gains were identified as the main drivers for adopting AI and ML solutions. Regarding implementation, 54% of education respondents indicated they have adopted Generative AI as their principal use case, with 49% reporting the use of AI or ML for speech recognition and natural language processing.
Level of satisfaction
The report also addressed user satisfaction with existing cloud object storage services. An overwhelming 95% of education respondents described themselves as satisfied with their services. This figure is five percentage points above the global average for satisfaction with cloud storage services across all sectors.
The Wasabi 2024 Global Cloud Storage Index gathered responses from 1,200 IT decision makers globally, representing both public and private organisations with more than 100 employees. For the education sector specifically, the findings suggest a continuing shift towards cloud-first strategies, with sustainability, integration capabilities, and compliance remaining top priorities.