News

Study: Hidden Cloud Storage Fees Catch IT Leaders Off Guard

• By David Ramel
• November 05, 2025

A recent survey reveals that the vast majority of IT leaders are blindsided by unexpected cloud storage fees — a financial oversight that’s undermining strategic planning and innovation.

According to new research commissioned by Backblaze, 95% of organizations storing more than 250TB in the public cloud have encountered surprise charges that disrupted budgets and slowed projects.

The report, based on a survey of over 400 IT decision-makers, underscores how complex and opaque billing practices around storage — including egress, retrieval and PUT fees — continue to hamper enterprise cloud operations. These charges, often overlooked during procurement, are forcing many organizations to alter data retention policies, reduce storage use, or reallocate budgets in ways that limit their agility and data-driven capabilities. The research further highlights the extent of storage complexities in the way of billing but acknowledges how cloud adoption is becoming more central to IT operations, in general.

In response to these unplanned costs, 85% of organizations reported taking steps to manage the impact. More than half--56%--said they are reducing the size of datasets stored in the cloud, while 45% are shortening storage duration policies. Another 40% said they are cutting spending elsewhere in their technology stack to compensate for higher storage costs. These adjustments are designed to create more predictable budgets, but they also limit the amount of data available for analytics, AI, and other high-value workloads. Larger organizations with more than 5 PB of data were especially likely to face frequent surprise charges.

The study identified egress fees--the cost to move data out of a provider's cloud environment--as a central factor in what many respondents described as data lock-in. A majority, 55%, said that egress and data transfer costs were the single biggest barrier to switching cloud storage providers. According to the report, this dynamic has created what it calls a "walled garden" effect, in which providers profit from data immobility rather than competition on service quality or innovation. That situation, the report noted, leads to slower cloud adoption, higher total cost of ownership, and limited agility for IT teams attempting to scale modern workloads.

Flexibility and interoperability challenges extend beyond egress costs. Nearly all respondents--99%--said limited flexibility and lack of interoperability are affecting their ability to deliver and scale digital initiatives. The findings indicate that while data may be secure in the cloud, it is often effectively stuck, difficult to integrate or use across platforms, and expensive to move between systems. For enterprises with complex hybrid or multi-cloud architectures, this friction is a significant constraint on efficiency and performance.

The report suggests that procurement priorities are shifting as a result. Sixty-two percent of respondents said they now prefer to assemble best-of-breed cloud environments rather than rely on one-stop-shop ecosystems. Predictability, transparency, and interoperability were the attributes cited most frequently as factors in provider selection. Backblaze noted that its own approach to storage--based on S3-compatible APIs, transparent egress policies, and flat pricing--aims to address the pain points identified in the survey.