Disaster Recovery Journal Summer 2023

Unfortunately, storage tier ing does nothing to address the other costs associated with using each provider’s cloud object storage offering. Storage tiering may even intro duce new usage fees since the lifecycle management has a cost associated with it. Further, storing data on different cloud object storage tiers complicates storage man agement. Using these other tiers to host data impacts the data’s availability and perfor mance. These tiers use storage media that is more prone to be offline and have slower access times even when online. This becomes problem atic from a management perspective. Cloud storage administrators cannot always anticipate when and how quickly specific applications need access to data stored in the cloud. This uncertainty makes administrators reluc tant to use cloud tiering at scale or using it all. Tiering may result in slow access times, data being unavailable, and it makes cloud storage management more compli cated. The Rise of Purpose-built Object Storage Clouds for Archival and Backup Data New purpose-built object storage clouds have emerged that address these cloud object storage issues of cost, com plexity, and performance. These new clouds distinguish themselves from the cloud object storage offerings avail able from general-purpose cloud providers in an impor

tant way. They specifically target organizations that want to store archival and backup data in the cloud. By primarily focusing on hosting data from these two applications, they provide the following three benefits for organizations: 1. Simplified management . These providers only offer one cloud object storage tier on which to store data. This eliminates the need to manage lifecycle policies or worrying about the storage tier on which data gets placed. 2. Lower monthly storage costs . They compete in cloud storage capacity costs by typically charging one-half to one-fifth of what general purpose cloud providers charge for a comparable storage tier. 3. No network usage or egress fees . These purpose-built providers eliminate the unpredictable costs that general-purpose cloud providers charge to access or retrieve data. They simply do not charge these fees. This gives organizations the flexibility to manage and retrieve data at their discretion. These three benefits make it appealing for organizations to store their archival and backup data with purpose-built cloud storage providers. However, organizations should not view these providers as a panacea for all their cloud storage chal lenges.

cloud object storage choices. However, they change a pre mium, their cloud storage feature set may be overkill for organizations, and it can become complex to manage. Further, if organizations want to switch, these providers make it difficult and charge an exit fee to leave them. Purpose-built cloud stor age providers offer a practical alternative for organizations that need to store their archi val and backup data off-site. These cloud providers charge less per GB, make their cloud storage easier to manage, and have almost no variable costs. However, they lack many of the robust availability and management features that some organizations may need. Organizations that only possess a few TBs of data and expect limited growth will still find choosing a general-pur pose cloud provider the easy choice. However, those organiza tions with rapidly growing cloud data stores, it behooves them to explore existing cloud object storage options. They can potentially reduce their monthly cloud storage costs by up to half while also elimi nating their management com plexity and data transfer and retrieval fees. v

The cloud storage tier these purpose-built cloud storage providers use to store data typically has lower availabil ity characteristics. They often do not offer availability zones that simultaneously store data in two or more geographic locations. Instead, they only store an organization’s data in one data center. If that spe cific data center goes offline for some reason, organizations must wait until it comes back online. Further, many of these pur pose-build providers currently own or lease fewer cloud data center locations than general purpose cloud providers. The geographic location of their data centers may preclude organizations from using them due to compliance or disaster recovery concerns. The Dynamics of Cloud The dynamics of cloud object storage have perma nently changed with organiza tions having more cloud object storage choices than ever. They have more providers from which to choose. Further, they may select from multiple cloud object storage offerings avail able at various price points with differing availability and performance characteristics. However, all these choices create challenges for orga nizations seeking to achieve broader corporate objectives without breaking the storage budget. General-purpose cloud pro viders offer the most robust Object Storage Have Permanently Changed

Jerome Wendt, an AWS Certified Solutions Architect, is the president and founder of DCIG, LLC., a technology analyst firm. DCIG, LLC.,

focuses on providing competitive intel ligence for the enterprise data protection, data storage, disaster recovery, and cloud technology markets.

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