Cloud storage costs are on the rise; many organizations’ cloud decision-makers have reported that cloud storage takes up more than one-quarter of their total cloud costs. (Some have even cited that it accounts for more than half.)

That’s a lot of cloud cheddar.

Insights like these have rolled in from multi-cloud infrastructure management software and SaaS (News - Alert) solutions provider, Virtana. Since its founding in 2008, Virtana has maintained its cloud-centric mission of delivering top infrastructure performance monitoring and precision data cloud analytics for its customers. Accelerating digital transformations by – at least, primarily – reducing cloud costs, enabling cloud arbitrage, and simplifying enterprise cloud complexities are all pillars of Virtana’s mission in the industry.

Virtana’s latest insights come from its independent research report, The State of Hybrid Cloud Storage 2023. As the company’s fourth annual multi-cloud survey, Virtana asked 350 cloud experts in the U.S. and the U.K. about their hybrid cloud storage usage, costs, and additional needs.

Here are some of the most notable takeaways from the survey:

• In the grand scheme of things, 84% of respondents want at least a large portion of their current storage to remain in the cloud. A smidge less than two-thirds of this same group (about 55% of it) want as much cloud storage as possible, but without lofty expenses.
• No single strategy – as far as Virtana could determine – has prevailed in order to best decide what storage to put in the cloud, and what to keep as on-prem. (Roughly 57% store in the cloud, leaving the remaining 43% for on-prem.)
• Between 31% and 33% of respondents rely on teams’ existing knowledge bases and cloud expertise, automated third-party tools, or recommendations from a trusted CSP (News - Alert).
• As the supply chain is having a direct impact on cloud storage for enterprises, 67% of respondents claim to spend more time sorting out procurement and supply chain management issues. Close to the same percentage (i.e. 65%) of them feel forced, on the other hand, to skip procurement and simply do what they can to extend the life of existing resources. (Though putting off necessary cloud transformation isn’t the ideal answer here.)
• Per Virtana and the International Data Corporation (IDC (News - Alert))’s Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker, companies’ spend on compute and storage infrastructure products (including dedicated and shared IT environments) has year-over-year increased by 24.7% since Q3 of 2022.

“Challenges in cloud markets predate the pandemic,” said Kuba Stolarski, Research Vice President for IDC’s Computing Platforms and Cloud Infrastructure Practice. “We see short-term shortages easing over time, but the effort required to deftly navigate the supply chain as technologies evolve only increases in complexity. Inherent to that complexity are cost increases, and what we’ve seen is very much in line with responses from Virtana’s survey – namely, rising acquisition costs, supply chain management costs, and costs from delays and suboptimal decisions made in an environment with too many variables to process."

Processing these variables effectively and in a timely manner, as Stolarski went on to say, can reduce storage hassles. “Automated tools that generate actionable intel may also remove operational bottlenecks and ultimately improve business outcomes.”

Jon Cyr, Virtana’s Vice President of Product, also reflected on the collected data. “Cloud storage doesn’t usually make breaking headline news,” Cyr said, “but it’s still essential to enterprise applications. And yet, many in the hybrid space aren’t thinking about or remotely preparing for growth, rising costs, and change.”

“That’s why observability and deep expertise in global hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure are so critical,” Cyr said confidently. “Not only do these help optimize the performance of cloud storage, but they reduce storage costs and better position businesses to deal with external challenges proactively, rather than reactively.”