As organisations grapple with rising cloud costs, many are shifting toward a more balanced  and hybrid approach when it comes to storage.

Findings from the third annual Wasabi Global Cloud Storage Index show that 44% of organisations in the UK, are pursuing a hybrid approach by deploying a mix of on premises and cloud solutions/services.

Conducted by Vanson Bourne, the Index surveyed 1,600 C-level leadership and managers involved in their organisation’s cloud storage purchasing process.

This year’s data explores themes around cloud storage purchase decisions, budgets and billing, data security challenges, and utilisation of services for use cases like backup and active archiving.

Unpredictable fees push organisations beyond their budgets

Among European respondents, cloud storage fees account for nearly half of all cloud billing expenses (47%), with the cost of actual stored capacity making up the remainder (approx. 53%).

In large part due to this unfavourable mix, organisations end up exceeding their cloud budgets – in the UK, 37% have exceeded it slightly and 14% massively over the past year. Germany has indicated the highest level of budget excess at 66%, followed by the Netherlands (64%), France (53%) and the UK (51%).

The main reason for budget excess are misalignment and difficulty forecasting planned and actual usage, combined with fees from various data operations like replication and object tagging.

44% of UK respondents stated that their actual data storage usage and growth was higher than forecasted, but in 91% of these cases it’s because of fee-related reasons.

For more than half of the European organisations (55%), egress or other data access fees associated with moving their data out of a public cloud environment have delayed IT or business initiatives.

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“Organisations are being unfairly penalised for using and moving their data by anti-competitive practices like high egress fees and complex pricing models.

“This is consequently stifling innovation, as data is the lifeblood for unlocking full growth potential.

“This also shows in our data with organisations being prompted to rethink their approach, leading many to strike a more balanced mix between cloud and on-premise solutions”, says Kevin Dunn, VP & GM EMEA, Wasabi.

The UK leads regional peers in “cloud-first” approach to IT services adoption

This year, UK organisations are leading the global race for cloud adoption, in equal place with the Netherlands – with 41% of businesses following a “cloud-first” strategy compared to the global average of 29% and European average of 34%.

“Cloud-first” is defined as prioritising cloud IT services adoption over any alternative requiring owned or on premises IT infrastructure.

“We believe the higher rates of ‘cloud-first’ organisations across Europe are a positive indication of the regions continued embrace of cloud IT services and cloud storage, and the growing preference among regional organisations to adopt cloud services, despite the complexity of data sovereignty, residency, and locality requirements”, comments Dunn.

When choosing a cloud storage provider, UK respondents’ top consideration is performance and scalability (41%), followed by sustainability (32%) and ease of use (30%).

For EMEA respondents across the board, native data protection, security and compliance was also brought up as the second highest priority (34%), preceded by performance and scalability (35%), and followed by sustainability (31%).