CIO OPINION
We can ’ t bury our heads in the sand and hope cloud costs will go down .
Alyssa Blackburn , Director of Information Management , AvePoint
Time for a 2024 cloud re-fresh
Alyssa Blackburn , Director , Information Management , AvePoint , says cloud storage solutions don ’ t have to be beyond budget constraints with smart , technologyenabled information management strategies .
Gartner forecasted Australian cloud spending to reach $ 23.2 billion in 2023 , jumping by 19.3 per cent from 2022 . As a result , 94 % of global IT leaders say their cloud storage costs are rising , according to a Virtana study .
The spike in costs is putting pressure on IT teams . With cloud no longer being a ‘ nice to have ’, 82 % of IT professionals and executives said that managing cloud spend was their biggest challenge , according to Flexera ’ s 2023 State of the Cloud report .
It ’ s clear we can ’ t bury our heads in the sand and hope cloud costs will go down . As businesses are bearing the brunt of the economic downturn , there ’ s going to be demands for cost-cutting . Whilst cloud storage is an unavoidable cost , with smart , technology-enabled information management strategies , it doesn ’ t have to be overwhelming or beyond budget constraints .
There are ways organisations can reduce their spending whilst increasing productivity and mitigating risks .
According to IDC ’ s Datasphere and StorageSphere forecast , globally we reached 6.7ZB of storage in 2020 and by 2025 , we ’ ll reach more than 200ZB of storage . A trap that many organisations fall into is assuming that cloud storage is ‘ cheap ’.
For years , a mantra of ‘ storage is cheap ’ has been uttered by many , but the rapid move to cloud has
44 INTELLIGENTCIO APAC www . intelligentcio . com