Your Business’s Storage Is Unlimited in the Cloud

With the amount of data growing by the day, companies and individuals alike feel a sense of urgency to find the most effective way to store all of it. The increase of data is pushing on-premises capacities to their limits, and many companies are quickly finding that their storage arrays will not support adding more disk drives. These occasions provide a natural time for organizations to examine using alternative storage technologies. Acquiring an on-premises storage array no longer represents the only or even the best option going forward, and you’ll regularly be in the market for more. There are usually a few triggering events that drive the need to acquire additional data storage. They range from the end of warranty or depreciation cycle of existing equipment, to a hardware simply wearing out, but the most common driver of new purchases is the need for additional capacity. Having to work within the limits of your on-premises hardware adds a layer of unnecessary friction to your business.

No organization ever buys a storage array with just enough capacity to meet current needs. Rather, it typically buys enough extra storage capacity to last until it acquires its next storage array. They must forecast how much storage capacity they will need in the future so they can appropriately size their new arrays. On the surface, that sounds like smart planning, but it’s actually just pushing the problem along. As your business grows, so too will its data output. The moment you upgrade your on-premise storage is the moment you start planning for the next upgrade.

Unfortunately, it also equates to an organization's spending money before it needs to spend it. This capacity sits unused until an organization needs it, if the organization needs it at all. The entire time this storage capacity sits idle represents wasted dollars. On-premises storage comes with a significant front-loading of the capital costs.

Two of the biggest advantages of cloud data storage are:

• Unlimited capacity
• Pay-as-you-go model

Unlimited Storage Capacity

Cloud storage providers remove worries about running out of storage capacity and the work associated with obtaining it. If an application needs more storage capacity, organizations can immediately and seamlessly add more storage to it. The cloud storage provider assumes all responsibilities for managing the physical storage infrastructure. Cloud object storage, like Wasabi hot cloud storage, allows for unlimited object storage scalability. While file storage can hold millions of files, you will eventually hit a limit. Cloud object storage scales to well into billions of objects, making it effectively unlimited. Object storage avoids the sizing limitations of other storage architectures by storing file data and metadata together in a single container with a unique, global identifier. This flat address model enables massive scalability; you can retrieve an object from a global storage pool quickly and efficiently, without navigating immense lookup tables or hierarchical data structures. You can track, index and analyze data in place – without external software databases.

Pay-as-you-go model

With on-premises storage, you are always paying for more than you use. The cloud’s pay-as-you-go approach closely aligns to the OPEX model that more organizations currently want to adopt. Using cloud storage, they avoid the need for making upfront CAPEX investments in storage. Cloud storage eliminates both capacity forecasting and overbuying and cloud storage pricing allows you pay for exactly what you use and not worry about over provisioning. This model is also ideal as an unlimited cloud backup repository. It can house as many objects as necessary, providing recovery options for entire systems should something go wrong.

A few years ago, many organizations dismissed cloud storage for various reasons. Its availability, immaturity, reliability and security features were, among others, reasons they cited for not pursuing cloud storage and aggressively as an option. Fast forward to today and organizations can no longer point to them as reasons not to adopt cloud storage. If anything, cloud storage providers offer more robust features than what many organizations find in their own data centers.

Too often, the default decision of many IT teams is to “just buy more” when an event triggers the need for additional storage. In preparation for the inevitable event, organizations should determine the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with on-premises storage arrays. Then once tabulated, they should compare that to the TCO associated with using cloud storage with its near-unlimited storage capability. When an event that triggers the need for additional storage capacity occurs, they will be well positioned to make an informed decision on what is the best option.