Executive Summary
Roughly 85% of companies already store some data with cloud providers or plan to do so in the very near future. No one disputes that point. It is the cloud’s cost and complexity that has a growing number of these same organizations wringing their hands. While they love the cloud’s benefits, they hoped to lower their costs and simplify IT as they adopted it. Instead, they often experience the opposite—more costs and complexity.
Trying to remedy this situation using their existing cloud provider’s solutions puts them between a rock and a hard place.
- If they put all their data on a provider’s single storage tier, their costs may escalate to budget-breaking levels.
- Alternatively, if they distribute data across multiple storage tiers to lower costs, their applications may break, underperform, or both.
Further, they must make time to configure, manage, and monitor these policies. These challenges leave them yearning for why they initially signed up for the cloud: access to simple storage services.
To achieve this goal, they need to choose a second-generation cloud storage provider that meets their needs. Wasabi Technologies represents such a provider. It gives organizations access to the affordable, high performance cloud storage that they seek. It also delivers on intangibles such as a provider network and integration with archive and backup provider software.
One cannot overstate the benefits of choosing a second-generation cloud storage provider and migrating their data to it. Organizations get a return to simple storage services while gaining access to sought-after simplicity, storage cost reductions, and performance improvements.
In response to the demands, second-generation cloud providers that focus on storage have emerged. These providers offer a single, well-performing, reliable tier of cloud storage at a single low price. This approach frees organizations to host their data in the cloud without worrying about its cost or complexity.
To turn these promises of these second-generation cloud providers into a reality, organizations must take three steps:
- Identify data to store in a cloud that gives them the most bang for the buck
- Identify a second-generation cloud provider to host this data
- Get their data into the new cloud
Most organizations will find their archive and backup data the most logical data to move. This data represents the greatest percentage of data, if not all of it, that they store in the cloud. It poses low levels of risk to migrate and can potentially generate significant monthly cost savings once moved.
Performing a cloud-to-cloud migration of these data types has become easier to perform in recent years. Organizations may choose from any of four available data migration options that best align with their priorities. Many organizations will find they save both time and money by changing cloud providers. The savings realized from using a second-generation cloud provider can offset whatever costs the data migration may incur.
The Cloud is the Future
Organizations will use the cloud, in whole or in part, to support their overall IT approach and strategy. If that statement describes your company, you are not alone. A June 2019 survey of individuals from nearly 600 companies found that 84 percent of them hold a similar view.1
The cloud’s broad level of adoption and acceptance across all organizational types comes as no surprise. Many consider using the cloud an integral part of their ongoing IT strategy when they consider its benefits, which include:
- 24x7x365 availability with five nines or more of uptime
- A pay-as-you-go on-demand business model
- Access to enterprise-class hardware and software features
- Elimination of managing on-premises IT infrastructure
- Enterprise-class data centers
Theoretically unlimited capacity
These benefits, among many others, address the challenges that organizations routinely confront when managing and supporting its on-premises IT infrastructure. Yet as more organizations store their data in the cloud, they will encounter an old set of challenges.
Cost and Complexity … They’re Back!
Unexpected costs and complexity top the list when it comes to storing and managing data in the cloud. Many organiza- tions store far more data in the cloud than they initially antici- pated. This leads to unexpected, recurring overruns that may grow month after month as a recent study revealed.2
Hidden and Unexpected Cloud Costs
Organizations ideally want to know how much the cloud will cost before they get the bill. Organizations largely only under- stand and budget for storing data in-house and on-premises. They may fail to grasp the extra fees that API operations, data retrievals, and egress fees, among others, incur.
These hidden fees lead to organizations paying far more than they expected or budgeted. Adding to their woes, many lack a reliable means to predict or budget what their cloud storage will cost going forward. These factors make them reticent to expand their use of the cloud.