The Advantages of Cloud Object Storage for Modern Businesses

How to choose the best cloud storage for business  

It’s no surprise that cloud storage for business is fast becoming a critical element of IT infrastructure. Applications use increasingly massive volumes of data, and anyone accessing a network expects fast, seamless experiences. According to market analyst IDC, the total global data storage capacity will reach 175 zettabytes (ZB), and 49% of the world’s stored data will reside in public cloud environments by 2025. All of this requires flexible, robust cloud storage that boosts performance.   

Cloud storage for business offers many advantages, from cost efficiency to enhanced system performance. But whether companies are migrating legacy, on-premises storage systems or integrating a cloud-first approach, they still need to understand their cloud storage options, and how to reduce complexity in storage approaches. 

The best business cloud storage solution leverages advanced cloud object storage technology to manage large datasets and keep unstructured data like video, image, audio, and log files secure, accessible, and easy to use. Cloud object storage  offers an ideal mix of price, performance, and security compared to other storage solutions. 

What is Cloud Object Storage? 

Different types of storage—file, block, and object—are used to organize data on servers. Companies should consider their current and future storage capacity needs, how they will use their data, and storage pricing factors before deciding on a cloud storage approach. 

 The most common, file-based storage, is based on manual filing systems, like pieces of paper stored in manila folders. Files are named and included in a directory with a few keywords to help understand the content. While this works for smaller documents like Word files, Excel sheets or PowerPoint presentations, massive datasets and performance-intensive applications will rapidly fill up the limited sizes of folders. Much like an overstuffed filing cabinet that can’t accept anymore folders, file storage quickly becomes overwhelmed, complex, and expensive as more and more storage devices are needed to keep up. 

Block architecture arranges data into blocks and spreads them across a network environment, with metadata about the files in those blocks stored separately. With a block-based approach, there is more control and granularity that enables applications to perform more quickly. This makes more data accessible, which helps users tap into larger datasets that need to be retrieved fast. However, the metadata storage capacity fills up quickly, and block storage is left with expanding amounts of directories to keep all the blocks categorized. As the metadata repository grows, lagged search time affects performance, and the storage system becomes more complex and difficult to scale, making it inherently costly.  

Cloud object storage organizes data as objects with unique identifiers and metadata in containers, avoiding the restrictions of both file and block storage approaches. This flat model—no files or directories—means the file cabinet won’t ever be full. Cloud object storage enables incredible scalability, with room for billions of objects that can be retrieved from one global storage system, without the need to hunt through extensive tables, folders, subfolders, or any hierarchical data structure. Unstructured data can be quickly accessed and analyzed in place, making object storage a robust replacement that is more efficient and cost effective than other types of physical or virtual storage.  

Historically, object storage was used mostly for “cold” data needs, such as backup and archiving, that needs to be stored for long periods of time but not retrieved often. But object storage technology is becoming so efficient that companies are tapping into it for their “hot” storage needs, when data is accessed, retrieved, and used frequently—and they’re seeing significant benefits and cost savings.  

Cloud object storage is:  

• Scalable. Simply add more capacity as your data grows, without worrying about performance or availability. 
• Secure. Ensure business continuity while protecting against ransomware with a range of built-in security features such as encryption, access control and immutable buckets.  
• Streamlined. Simplify the burden of managing expensive, physical storage infrastructure and keep your focus on key business initiatives.   
• Flexible. Leverage near-unlimited capacity to transfer and share massive media files and enhance productivity.  
• Cost efficient. Implement pricing and budget predictability with a flat, one-tier storage option that cuts through all the complexity of other storage architecture. 

 Advantages of Cloud Object Storage for Business 

As the limitations of on premises storage become more clear, the nearly unlimited potential of cloud storage offers a great deal of advantages to companies seeking data efficiency, greater user experiences and business transformation.   

Cloud object storage is ideal for a variety of business-critical use cases, including:   

Backup & recovery. Backup, test, and restore data while protecting it from security breaches and meeting recovery time metrics after a loss or system outage.   

Ransomware Protection. Maintain data integrity with immutable object storage buckets that ensure data can’t be altered or deleted for the defined retention period, protecting against hackers and cyberattacks.   

Archiving. Reclaim expensive on premises storage space and instantly access data across locations. Archived content can be edited virtually, enabling collaboration.  

Surveillance. Extend your on-prem storage capacity and enable virtual systems while ensuring video files remain free from corruption.  

Cloud Compute. Integrate with hyperscale cloud providers while maintaining instant access to data that needs frequent compute resources and lowering total cost of cloud infrastructure. 

Big Data Analytics. Gain insights from data collected in large datasets, such as IoT devices, research, medical, financial, and more. Store and manage data, identify market trends, customer behaviors and other business-critical operations.  

Web apps (cloud-based applications and services). Run cloud-native applications with the scalability and durability that object storage is designed for.  

Wasabi’s Hot Cloud Storage solution for small business and enterprise takes the advantages of cloud object storage even further.  

Cloud Storage for Small Business: Stay Competitive  

Business growth can turn on the edge of your data. But without the IT budget of the larger competitors, how can companies keep up? Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage offers small businesses all the big business benefits of secure data management without the high cost and complexity of other public cloud providers. With a streamlined one-tier service model priced at $.0058 per gigabyte/month ($5.99 per terabyte/month), companies save 80% or more over the larger providers, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.That puts the dollars back where you want them—investing in your business.  

Our pay-as-you-go cloud object storage ensures you only buy what you need. Scale from 1 TB to exabytes of data, increase or decrease storage as your business requires, and gain greater control over your cloud storage budget. Wasabi does not charge for data transfer (egress) or API requests, enabling significant savings over other cloud platforms’ backup and disaster recovery offerings, as well.   

Wasabi’s Hot Cloud Storage has robust security and reliability features that protect your data against accidental destruction, cyberattacks, and theft. Once an object is stored in an immutable bucket, it cannot be altered or removed, making cloud object storage ideal for compliance audits.  

And Wasabi serves as a partner who knows it’s important to keep IT time manageable. Wasabi’s Hot Cloud Storage can be activated in minutes and used with any backup or file management solution.   

Cloud Storage for Enterprise: Budget for Maximum Reliability 

Regardless of how large your company’s data needs are, Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage for Enterprise serves up significant price and performance advantages over AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.  

In addition to our flexible monthly payment option, Wasabi offers reserved capacity storage pricing that lets you purchase storage capacity for a period of 1, 3 or 5 years. With RCS, pay only for storage that is reserved, helping you ensure budget predictability and cost efficiency. 

RCS can significantly reduce storage costs up to 27% on pay-as-you-go prices, but regardless which you choose, you receive the same enterprise-class, high-performance cloud storage for business with no fees for egress or API requests and no complex storage tiers. 

Wasabi delivers maximum protection for your data. We provide enterprise class 11 x 9s data durability, which means ensuring stored data does not suffer from bit rot, degradation or other corruption whether it’s been stored for a day or 15 years. You can be confident your data is exactly the same with no modifications and nothing missing.  

Our 360-degree approach to security includes physical, data and payment security capabilities. We host multiple US and European data centers with public and private network connectivity to locations around the world. Wasabi solutions are validated with hundreds of storage applications, business applications with native cloud storage interfaces, and SDKs. 

Our high-performing, robust and easy-to-use cloud object storage solutions are trusted by globally recognized brands. From modern Major League Baseball clubs like the Boston Red Sox, which needs to collect and analyze petabytes of data after every game, to an Ivy League University with data tapes that couldn’t keep up with storage demands, companies across a range of industries have recognized that Wasabi’s Hot Cloud Storage is a game changer.  

Conclusion 

Thanks to Wasabi’s advanced cloud object storage capabilities, companies have a robust, competitive option for moving their data to the cloud. Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage for business is fast enough for backup and recovery, and robust enough for archiving, while avoiding the complex, expensive tiered-storage models of public cloud providers. As the need to distinguish between hot and cold storage fades, companies are left with just one, simplified tier of storage. So you can afford to keep your data and use it to meet your critical business needs.