AI spend is surging, but ROI is patchy; what the Wasabi Cloud Storage Index means for UK SMEs
Here is what matters in this year’s Wasabi Global Cloud Storage Index; AI projects are racing ahead of value realisation, while storage economics still trip up governance, budgeting, and cyber resilience for small firms. The good news is that SMEs can respond with a few disciplined moves that reduce cost, risk, and disappointment at the same time.
Why this matters now; AI ambition meets SME reality
Wasabi’s 2026 findings land at a moment when many UK small businesses feel pressured to “do AI” quickly. However, the report’s headline is a caution sign, not a brake. Wasabi states: “32% of respondents say their AI projects are delivering a positive return today.”
In practice, that means two-thirds of organisations are still paying for experimentation, integration, and data readiness. For SMEs, that can collide with immediate needs such as ransomware prevention, phishing protection, and meeting UK GDPR security measures. Storage is also not a passive cost. It underpins backups, incident response evidence, and day-to-day collaboration.
What the report is really saying; clear definitions
Two terms are worth demystifying.
ROI (Return on Investment)
ROI is the measurable value you get back compared with what you spent. For AI, “spend” includes licences, cloud compute, storage, data engineering time, and security controls. “Return” should be defined upfront, such as fewer hours on admin, faster quotes, lower fraud losses, or improved customer retention.
Storage fees versus storage spend
Wasabi also highlights a persistent pattern across industries; organisations often pay roughly the same again in cloud fees as the raw storage they think they are buying. The plain English takeaway is that egress, API calls, replication, minimum retention, and retrieval performance tiers can quietly double the bill.
As a result, AI workloads can look affordable in a pilot, then become expensive when they scale and start moving data around.
The SME cyber angle; data sprawl increases attack surface
AI projects tend to copy data into new places; data lakes, vector databases, SaaS tools, and analyst sandboxes. That expands your attack surface, meaning the number of systems and pathways an attacker can exploit.
For sme cybersecurity and compliance for SMEs, this matters because:
* More copies of data increase the impact of a breach.
* Poorly controlled storage can weaken ransomware recovery if backups share credentials or are reachable from compromised accounts.
*Logging and access control often lag behind speed of deployment.
