Cloud storage is a must-have, and demand for it keeps growing. We take a look at what’s on offer from the latest addition to our Cloud Infrastructure and Platforms portfolio – Wasabi Technologies.
Wasabi provides a cloud storage service that is scalable, secure, and cost-effective. Its solutions are built on high-performance architecture, which offers robust data durability.
The big claim to fame for Wasabi is its pricing model. There’s no data tiering, just a simple, predictable pricing structure for fast access to data, whether hot or cold. There are no fees for setup, no egress charges, and Wasabi does not ping you at the checkout for API requests.
This is great news for partners. Hyper-competitive pricing structures with no hidden fees and charges makes it possible to offer customers a great cloud storage option at a price they’ll find attractive, without leaving most of your margin on the table.
The appetite for cloud storage remains strong with SMB buyers. 63% of SMBs invested in cloud storage solutions over the past two years, and 28% intend to adopt. There is plenty of opportunity to service customers with existing solutions and provide a differentiated offer to businesses that have yet to get their cloud storage solutions in place.
Looking forward, the big swing in budgeting priorities for SMBs is toward hybrid cloud storage, with 49% intending to adopt solutions in the run up to 2025.
While Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage was developed for public cloud, it’s S3 compatible API and third-party management solutions make it a simple go-to for most hybrid (and multi-cloud) storage use cases.
Our recently landed survey of SMB decision makers across the region showed there are concerns about security and privacy when it comes to data protection and disaster recovery.
Wasabi offers a response to these concerns with its Object Lock data protection tool. This allows for the safeguarding of objects and files by making them unchangeable until a specified time has passed. This is a smart aspect of Wasabi’s engineering that makes it great for managing sensitive or controlled data sets.
Happy, Shiny, User Interface
Administrators will appreciate the Wasabi interface. It’s clean and does not present the rigidity of some other storage solutions when it comes to file types and formats. There’s the usual folders and subfolder structures, and Wasabi also allows users to create buckets for broad data groups.
Access controls and permissions for users and applications are also straightforward. Administrators can define and manage controls and permissions, configure access policies, set up MFA and manage encryption keys with relative ease.
We also appreciate the automated lifecycle policies within Wasabi’s solution. Data lifecycle management is relatively simplified by setting defined rules for data retention, archival and deletion. By automatically applying policies based on predefined rules, there’s less productivity drain involved with ensuring data retention compliance policies are being adhered to correctly.
Monitoring and reporting features are comprehensives, allowing administrators to gain insights into storage usage, performance metrics and billing information. There’s not a lot of convoluted steps required to track and pull details on storage consumption, resource allocation and costs.
Keep an eye out for updates on Wasabi, which may include the introduction of the Wasabi Ball Data Transfer device for the APAC region. This is a service that allows users to order a device from Wasabi, transfer their data on to it and boomerang it back to the Wasabi team. Wasabi then run the secure upload to the users’ cloud storage server, which eliminates the inherent risks associated with transferring data over internet connections. There is no definitive date for this service to launch in APAC, but it’s a great customer-centric approach to look forward to.
Wasabi’s durability and redundancy can provide a reliable offsite backup solution for BDR, while its low cost is reasonably competitive for archiving and long-term data storage needs. Amazon Deep Freeze is cheaper on this front, but it doesn’t provide the immediate availability should the data be needed.
Got some play in the big data space? Partners can use Wasabi to store large volumes of data. Using their scalable storage opens up the opportunity to build data lakes or warehouses, and work with your customers to analyse and identify value in it, instead of picking over the pricing bones.
There’s also a reasonably strong case for presenting the benefit of Wasabi for application development and testing. Storing application files, logs and test data in Wasabi can support seamless access, versioning and sharing of resources throughout the development lifecycle. This gives partners another option for customers that have a need in this area but may not be quite mature enough or confident enough to delve into Azure DevOps.
With such a hyper-competitive pricing structure, there must be a catch, right? Not really. In our view, Wasabi is very transparent about its pricing policy and its pricing FAQs are up front about when their solution is not going to be a good fit for users.
For example, while the business has a free egress policy, Wasabi limits monthly egress to be equal to the amount stored. This means users with monthly downloads greater than their active storage volume will not find Wasabi a great fit.
Wasabi has a minimum time to store of 90 days, which means admins should be careful and deliberate about deletions. Uploading and then deleting, and then reuploading can result in paying to store data that is not active. Work within the 90-day window, and this shouldn’t be an issue.
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