What Industry Professionals Look for in a Cloud Service—and What’s Stopping Them from Migrating

Here at Wasabi, we spend a lot of time thinking about the cloud: how people use it, what they think, and how it can be improved. We’re always looking to understand more about the public perception of the cloud, so while we were at the SEAT Conference in Daytona, we asked the nation’s leading sports industry professionals for their thoughts on the cloud. Here is what they said, along with our takeaways from that data.

What Do People Look for in a Cloud?

Respondents ranked data protection as the most important factor in choosing a cloud service. This makes perfect sense—trusting your valuable, sensitive data to a third party can be intimidating, and with stories of data breaches dominating the news cycle, it’s not hard to see why security is seen as a top priority. But despite the common consensus, the cloud is just as secure as on-premise data systems, and may even be more secure. Wasabi follows industry-best security models and security design practices; all our data is encrypted during transit and at rest, and our premier tier 4 datacenter facilities are staffed by security around the clock.

Another high-ranking factor in cloud choice is the presence of additional fees. Services like Amazon S3 are notorious for tacking on charges to storage bills. An entire industry of products, consultants, and web forums is dedicated to deciphering the unpredictable world of AWS fees. Everything from API call charges, egress fees, and data transfer costs all amount to a completely unpredictable monthly statement.

Consumers hate being nickeled and dimed by companies they’re already paying which is why we designed Wasabi’s pricing structure to be dead simple. You won’t pay for egress, API calls, or any fees related to tiers. The only line item on your Wasabi bill is storage.

Conversely, respondents ranked freedom from vendor lock-in as the least important factor in choosing a cloud service. In reality, binding your data to one company and one company only is doing your data a disservice. Wasabi has written extensively on the perils of vendor lock-in and how the best cloud experience is one where the customer can choose best-of-breed services that suit their use case and budget. Much like how the importance of security might come from a place of ignorance about the cloud, so too does the perceived unimportance of lock-in.

What’s Stopping You?

Now that we know what people look for in a cloud, we can examine what’s stopping them from making the leap. Respondents listed the amount of data being stored and budget as the top two obstacles to cloud migration. Both are important to consider: how much time and effort is getting all of my data to the cloud going to take, and how much will it cost to keep it there? Thankfully, Wasabi has solutions for both of these issues.

Wasabi has several transfer methods that accelerate moving large amounts of data to the cloud. The Wasabi Ball Transfer Appliance is a 100 TB hard drive meant to bypass the high network costs and long transfer times often associated with moving large amounts of data over the Internet. We send the Wasabi ball to you, you fill it up with data, then send it back to us where your data can be quickly transferred onto your storage bucket. Wasabi Direct Connect is a high-speed, private, secure connection from your location directly to Wasabi. It is several times faster than a standard public Internet connection and vastly improves transfer times for large datasets.

As for the issue of price, Wasabi is 1/5th the cost of Amazon S3 with no hidden fees for egress API requests. We spend a lot of time thinking about the cost of storage, and what that can do for businesses: how much more they could accomplish, what new discoveries could be made. We think we’ve got that one pretty well covered.

So sure, moving to the cloud can be tough. But what’s most encouraging is that 0% said they had no plans to move to the cloud. Clearly every respondent thinks the future is in the cloud, and they would be absolutely correct. Our survey also found that over half of respondents had more than 25% of their data in the cloud already, with another 19% testing out the waters with a few projects. This proves that these obstacles are not insurmountable; businesses are finding their way into cloud services.