What Does the 2027 EDUCAUSE Top 10 Mean for Higher Ed Storage?

At this year's EDUCAUSE conference in Denver, one theme ran through nearly every session: change, and how little anyone can predict about where it goes next. Each year, EDUCAUSE surveys its members to rank the technology issues facing higher education. The 2027 EDUCAUSE Top 10, unveiled at the conference, was The Age of Perpetual Change.

For the first time, artificial intelligence landed at No. 1. Mark McCormack of EDUCAUSE highlighted that the ranking signals urgency more than agreement, since most institutions are still working out what AI is worth to them. EDUCAUSE president and CEO John O'Brien put the larger question to the room: how does an institution move forward when nobody can say what the future looks like? A record 882 people voted this year.

That's a hard question for IT teams working with tight budgets, an enrollment gap, and a growing list of cyber threats. One panelist said you can only move forward at the speed of trust, and that idea came up again and again.

Even though storage didn’t show up on the list, it’s vital to almost every item there. Let's look at where it connects to AI return on investment (ROI), enrollment pressure, cybersecurity, and data governance.

The value of AI and why storage decisions shape ROI

AI's new front-and-center ranking reflects both interest and caution. EDUCAUSE found that 94% of surveyed higher education IT, institutional research, HR, and business professionals used AI for work in the past six months, and 73% of them use it daily or weekly. Institutions are now asking harder questions before they purchase. McCormack described rubrics that ask questions like: Does it save meaningful time? Does it add new costs or risks? Those questions apply to storage too.

The 2026 Wasabi Global Cloud Storage Index surveyed 1,700 IT decision makers and found that only 32% say their AI projects deliver a positive return today. In education, it was 37%. Those education respondents also use 67% of their AI infrastructure budgets for data, storage, and compute. Half of them said that the cost of storing and accessing data was their biggest obstacle to getting AI projects running.

On the panel, Terri Gustafson of Northwestern Michigan College talked about offering both guardrails and the freedom to explore. If the answer is always no, she said, people will go experiment somewhere else.

Faculty and researchers will test new tools, and some of those tests will go nowhere. When moving a dataset between tools triggers egress fees, each experiment is costly. AI-ready, high-performance storage with flat pricing and no egress fees keeps testing affordable, and S3 compatibility lets the storage work with the platforms research teams already use. Jodie Penrod, chief information officer (CIO) at Marshall University, ran workshops so staff could work out where AI helps them most. Her next step is measuring ROI on the tools that come out of those sessions.

Enrollment shifts call for predictable cloud economics

Enrollment came in at No. 8 overall, but individual rankings shifted depending on the size of the institution. Schools with fewer than 2,000 students ranked it first, while larger institutions tended to leave it off their top 10. Nick Nissley, president of Northwestern Michigan College, shared one reason: last year, 28 public community colleges in Michigan competed for 16,000 high school graduates. A speaker in the keynote said the enrollment cliff is no longer a hypothetical.

For tuition-dependent schools, that means budget pressure, and that pressure reaches IT quickly. Allan Chen of the California Institute of the Arts told the session to "right-size all of your initiatives." Storage is a good place to start because the fees are often unpredictable. In our 2026 Cloud Storage Index, 41% of education respondents exceeded their public cloud storage budget last year, and the share of spending that goes to fees such as egress and API operations keeps growing. Across industries, 50% of cloud storage spending goes to fees instead of capacity.

Wasabi pricing is flat, with no egress fees, and Reserved Capacity Storage lets institutions commit to capacity ahead of time. For a CIO at a tuition-dependent school, that turns next year's storage cost into a number finance can plan around, and it makes saying yes to a new project easier.

Cybersecurity and trust: What happens when you don’t have to think about protection

Cybersecurity ranked No. 3 on the EDUCAUSE Top 10. This year, it’s framed as a balance between clear boundaries and individual autonomy.

Jonathan Neff, chief information security officer at the University of Montana, said boundaries only work when the people inside them feel protected, not forced to conform. California State University's CISO, Josh Callahan, said people are the first line of defense. A Ted Lasso comparison came up on the panel too: not everyone has to be a goalie, but everyone should know what's going on and understand they have a role in protecting data.

That puts a good deal of pressure on backup and recovery, which works best when faculty and staff don’t have to think about it. Wasabi Object Lock makes data immutable for a set retention period, so no one can alter or delete it. Covert Copy™ adds a virtual air-gapped copy of your data that attackers can't see, so there's always something to restore. Multi-User Authorization brings up to three individuals to approve sensitive actions, like deleting backups. These methods protect without adding steps to most users’ daily workflows.

The need is clear and well-defined. In our 2026 Cloud Storage Index, 44% of education respondents lost access to public cloud data to a cyberattack in the past year, and only 47% were confident they could keep data unaltered and operational afterward. Immutability use grew among education respondents from 49% to 63% over the same period.

Connecting data and tools across the institution

No. 7 on the list is building a data governance backbone. McCormack noted that for some institutions, the hardest part is figuring out where to start. Data feeds AI analytics and public-facing chatbots, yet it sits in disconnected systems. The EDUCAUSE No. 10 is the same challenge from a different angle: institutions want interoperability from their partners and fewer duplicate tools, and many are in the middle of enterprise resource planning (ERP) rollouts.

Storage is a great first step for both of these issues, because that’s where departmental data usually ends up. Wasabi Account Control Manager gives central IT one view across every department's storage while each department keeps control of its own data. S3 compatibility extends that view to your existing backup tools, including Veeam and Commvault.

One panelist’s advice for connectivity: if you work in IT, go spend time with academics. If you work in academics, go visit IT.

Storage for the future, in the face of perpetual change

When the panel was asked for one leadership lesson, the answers included be kind and don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Storage can't help with kindness, but it can take two worries off the table: what next quarter's bill will look like, and whether a ransomware attack ends in a restore. IT teams can spend their energy instead on the issues on the EDUCAUSE Top 10 list.