Disaster Recovery Journal Summer 2023

data into their respective storage clouds over the Internet. However, organizations that transfer data out of the provider’s cloud may incur egress fees depending on the data transfer amount. While some providers allow organizations to transfer some data out (up to 100GB) monthly, egress fees start after that. These network usage fees range from .02 to .16 cents/GB. n Data transfer or egress to another data center within ensure they store their data in the right location within the provider’s cloud. Each provider has cloud data center locations all over the globe. If an organization stores its data in the wrong location and needs to move it, it gets charged a fee. These three represent only a snapshot of the additional cloud object storage fees that organization may incur. If they plan to encrypt it, monitor it, or replicate it, these activities may also incur further cloud object storage fees. These fees have less of an impact on organizations that only store TBs or even tens of TBs in the cloud. However, organizations that expect to store more than tens of TBs in the cloud should explore new cloud object storage options. These options may help lower storage costs, simplify man agement, and even eliminate unexpected data retrieval and transfer fees. the provider’s cloud . Organizations must also

‘Easy’ and ‘Safe’ Come at a Premium Organizations often first consider cloud object storage from the three largest gen eral-purpose cloud provid ers. Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3), Google Cloud Storage, and Microsoft Blob each provide the core tech nical features that orga nizations seek. Equally important, these general purpose cloud providers have a global presence and a high level of awareness within organizations. These factors contribute to any of these provider’s cloud stor age offerings being an easy, safe choice for organizations to make. However, these three options come at an elevated cost. Unless organizations choose otherwise, these gen eral-purpose cloud providers assign their standard cloud object storage tier by default. The costs for this tier range from $15-23 TB per month or $180-276/TB per year, depend ing on the provider. Organizations that store up to a few dozen terabytes of data on their default object storage tier may find these costs acceptable. Though organizations pay a premium, they obtain the availability, data security, performance, reliability, and peace of mind they seek. Further, many stor age appliances and archival, backup, and data manage ment software providers sup port these cloud object storage offerings.

Counting Cloud Storage’s Cost Paying $180 per year for 1TB of cloud storage or even up to $2,760 per year for 10TB may not sound like a lot. However, any organization that takes the time to count cloud object storage’s cost quickly sees how these costs add up. Further, the cloud storage capacity costs only represent a portion of what organizations may pay. Once organizations store data on cloud object stor age, they need to consider how frequently they will access and move it. If organizations end up performing these tasks fre quently, they may incur other fees that include: n Data retrieval . Once organizations store data in the cloud, they may need to access and manage it in multiple ways through a web interface. These activities may include copying it, getting a listing of it, or retrieving it, among other possible tasks. Executing any of these commands incurs a fee above and beyond the organization’s monthly storage costs. The data retrieval fees charged by providers are nominal (no more than 5 cents per 1,000 requests.) However, they can add up for organizations that expect to frequently take actions on their data.

Pros and Cons of Cloud Object Storage Tiering Organizations that primar ily store archival and backup data with the largest cloud pro viders may only infrequently incur data retrieval fees. They will more likely feel their wallet impacted by the costs associated with storing more archival and backup data. The other cloud object storage tiers available from these provid ers may help control and even lower recurring monthly stor age costs. Enabling cloud object stor age tiering represents both an easy and a complicated deci sion. These providers make it relatively easy to move data to other cloud object storage tiers. To do so, a cloud adminis trator for the organization logs into the organization’s cloud account. Once logged in, the individual can choose one of two options. 1. The administrator can simply move the storage to another tier. 2. Alternatively, they may use the provider’s lifecycle management feature. Using this feature, it places data on different storage tiers as the data ages. It can even delete data once it reaches a certain age. Moving data to other cloud storage tiers will likely result in organizations lowering their recurring monthly storage costs. However, this is not a guarantee. Organizations can optionally choose to move data to more expensive storage tiers.

n Data transfer or egress outside the provider’s cloud . No cloud provider currently charges organizations to transfer

26 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | SUMMER 2023