Rising cloud costs are leading European businesses to postpone staff hiring and budget increases, particularly in cyber security and AI projects. Research indicates that 67% of IT decision-makers expect their cloud expenses to rise in the next year, largely driven by increased data storage demands, growing AI use, and inflation. Two-thirds of respondents plan to either cut spending or maintain their budgets in critical areas. While many anticipate higher costs, over half do not expect costs to become unmanageable. Moreover, a significant majority wishes for reduced cloud service costs.
"Cloud spending is growing fast - exponentially for some - and it's holding businesses back from investing in growth and innovation," said James Kretchmar, global CTO of the cloud technology division at Akamai Technologies.
"New AI projects (26%) and cyber security (also 26%) were the areas that suffered the most, followed by IT staff hiring (24%) and hardware upgrades (18%)..."
"However, while respondents are anticipating an increase in their cloud spend, more than half (57%) said they didn't expect their organisation's cloud costs to become unmanageable, while 20% thought the opposite."
"Perhaps unsurprisingly, 90% of those polled said they would like to see cloud providers reduce the cost of using their data storage (40%), AI and machine learning (30%) and database services (27%)."
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