What We Heard at Actifio Data Driven 2019

Last week was the Actifio Data Driven 2019 event in Boston, where we listened to hundreds of technologists and business leaders from around the globe who are focused on data-intensive transformations in their organizations. There is truly a data revolution underway, and it’s been coming for a long time.

Actifio’s role keeps growing in more and more of our customers’ data-driven success stories. The Data Driven conference continues to be an important event for Wasabi to discuss the benefits of our hot cloud storage service with leading enterprise customers and technology alliance partners.

Some recurring themes:

• Cloud Costs: Customers who’ve been looking at first-generation cloud providers don’t realize the hidden charges that await – and how they can side-step them.
• On-prem vs. Cloud: There’s a lot of baggage to unpack for storage. Public cloud storage is key to smarter data management, on-prem storage is simply too expensive and too slow to keep pace with the rising tide of data.
• Shifting to “Anything-as-a-Service” (XaaS): Wasabi’s cloud storage Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Actifio’s Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) are providing new options to customers as they transition not just from on-prem to the cloud, but embracing entirely new cloud capabilities, from multi-cloud data protection to data virtualization across multiple clouds.

Cloud Costs

I was fortunate enough to be on a panel led by IDC analyst Archana Venkatraman, speaking to the audience about the virtues of cloud storage for today’s data requirements. When the question of the costs of egress and API request charges came up, Wasabi’s story resonated well with the audience given that we don’t charge for either. This is a differentiator that continues to attract customers as a deciding factor whether to stay on-prem or make the move to the cloud. The unpredictable costs of first-generation cloud storage have kept a lot of companies on the sideline.

Wasabi SVP of Product Jim Donovan speaking at Actifio Data Driven 2019

Actifio makes your backup and copy data management systems smarter, and we make storing it far cheaper. The combined offering opens up serious opportunities for mastering your data and freeing up resources for the value-add work, which is truly using data to drive your business farther and faster than your competitors.

On-prem vs. Cloud

Cloud storage isn’t new, but both the price and performance have changed with Wasabi. Many data-focused projects assume you need to keep both your compute and storage on-prem for the speed benefits. And yet there are a huge variety of data projects that don’t have those requirements, and simply need storage at a price that makes all of their needs possible at prices that don’t make it pure insanity to attempt.

While the Actifio crowd is more naturally inclined to think of the cloud as a viable option, there is still plenty of legacy thinking that we all need to shake loose to move forward.

Factually, cloud storage (at least with Wasabi) is now cheaper than on-prem storage. If you have Dell EMC, NetApp, or other traditional enterprise storage equipment, it’s eventually going to go out of warranty and become obsolete. You can typically store a petabyte of data in Wasabi for less than just the annual maintenance on a petabyte of on-prem storage. And then you never have to worry about upgrades, maintenance, hardware refreshes, or the ability to provide remote access by configuring firewalls, VPNs and other security layers. Dropping the price of cloud storage by 80% has really changed the equation, so if you’ve been waiting to take your data to the cloud, the time is now!

Shifting to “Anything-as-a-Service” (XaaS)

Wasabi’s cloud storage Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Actifio’s Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) offerings are providing new options to customers as they transition not just from on-prem to the cloud, but embracing entirely new cloud capabilities, from multi-cloud data protection to data virtualization across multiple clouds.

Actifio now offers Actifio GO SaaS for backup and recovery of VMs, physical machines and databases to easily manage your data protection needs for on-premises workloads using cloud object storage such as Wasabi.

Wasabi is the only cloud object storage provider that can be provisioned directly from within Actifio GO platform, making the combination of Actifio GO SaaS and Wasabi hot cloud storage the fastest and least expensive option of the cloud providers available thru Actifio GO for “instantly” backing up your on-prem workloads.

What Will Next Year Hold?

The market is ramping up quickly as the migration to the cloud is now fully in effect.

What will we hear next year in the partnership with Actifio and our joint customers? No predictions just yet, but if your business wants to be data driven, the combination of Actifio and Wasabi should be on your list as part of the foundation of your data strategy.