It’s Time toTalk Finance

Why on-prem storage can’t compete with the cloud

Data. There’s no question your company creates loads of it, it is critical for your success as a business, but it costs a laughable amount to store. You know you need to spend money to make money, but we can all agree we’d like to make a lot more than we spend. So let’s talk about your options for great data storage at a great price.

TRUE COST OF ON-PREM

The traditional storage choice is to keep your data on-premises. No CFO gets giddy about the idea of fixed costs, so the idea of investing in pricey infrastructure such as servers, racks, cooling equipment, and wires (don’t get me started on the wires!) feels like a black hole of time, money and effort. Top it off with payments for speciality technicians, costs for physical storage, looming power bills. Not to mention your risk of a natural disaster or human mistake incinerating the lifeblood of your company. Which isn’t the most comfortable financial feeling.

On-prem is expensive, it’s bulky, and the cloud is RIGHT THERE. As my favorite IT guy and professional data wrangler Nate says, “it’s like maintaining your own power plant when there’s a power line running right next to your office.”

My vote for on-prem? A hard pass.

GET YOUR HEAD IN THE CLOUDS

By this point, people ranging from your CEO to your dog-walker have probably shared their opinion that “the cloud is the future”, but it seemed like migrating would be a huge pain in the neck when what you were already doing was working just fine. But lately, you’ve been growing quickly and the last thing you want to do is spend money on more physical assets that start losing value the moment you start using them.

With data in the cloud, your IT team doesn’t have to be stuck fixating on cooling down servers, drying up humidity, and fitting in more rack space. You can empower them to spend time on activities that grow your business and increase value. It’s a win-win: Your IT crew is freed up to move from costly line item to business-building badasses, and you get more brain power focused on improving the bottom line.

Finally (and believe me, I’m as sick of hearing it as you are), the world’s changed a bit in 2020. Data has to, as well. Worldwide accessibility, multi-location usage, and a generally more distributed workforce make keeping your data in a room in your office feel more and more antiquated. Not to mention slow. With any cloud solution, you’re working in a model that’s designed for our “new normal”.

Getting your data to the cloud is starting to feel less like a risk, and more like the safer, smarter choice. If you work on the financial side of things, you understand the need to combine smart financial decisions with some tech-savvy thinking. But how do you convince others within your company to get on board?

CHECK ALL THE BOXES WITH WASABI

On-premises is fading into the rearview mirror like an explosion behind an action movie hero — what’s next? Enter Wasabi. Wasabi is a cloud storage company that’s built a model based on commoditizing cloud storage. Instead of confusing pricing tiers and layers of storage, it’s just hot storage (the kind you can quickly access), at a flat price, with no fees hiding in the shadows.

Pricing is super simple, with no extra fees tacked on top of your baseline package prices. It’s just a flat $.00599 per gigabyte, per month (if you want to skip ahead to the next section to compare it to Amazon, go ahead, I won’t judge). One low line item, not a spreadsheet you need a forensic accounting degree to unpack.

What happens if your company keeps growing? Easy, with a simple pricing structure, you can predict exactly what your costs will be down the road. You just buy more capacity, at the same rate. Does your company need quick access to data stored in the cloud ? No problem, and no added cost.

Are you feeling nostalgic about on-prem storage? Or maybe you already have on-prem and don’t want to make a big shift immediately? It’s ok. Wasabi plays nicely with others, including existing storage solutions and backup and recovery tools. And if you’re worried about security and reliability, cloud solutions have durability far beyond any single-site on-prem solution.

WHY THE BIG THREE AREN’T THE ANSWER

You’re a savvy financial mind (like me), so you’re definitely going to comparison shop the lumbering giants of the field: Amazon, Google and Microsoft. It’s the smart thing to do.

First things first: cost. You and I know we’re not smashing open the piggy bank no matter how excited the IT team gets. With Amazon, Microsoft Azure and Google, you’re getting a big brand name, but you’re also getting a big brand cost. Even at their base prices, those plans can add up in a hurry. For 1PB of hot storage (again, the kind you can quickly access), and 20% data egress per year, Microsoft comes out to $480,677/year, AWS is $515,899/year, and Google is a whopping $528,433/year. Meanwhile, for the same petabyte, Wasabi is just $73,605 per year! This isn’t exactly advanced calculus.

One thing to watch out for is the wild world of tiered pricing. For example, Amazon offers five storage tiers with different resiliency characteristics and pricing schedules and separate usage-based storage, request and transfer fees. It boils down to a pricing system based on opaque variables that’s hard to understand and harder to predict. It’s enough to drive even the biggest finance nerd crazy. Some companies even require an external firm to help them analyze and reconcile their monthly bills!

Let’s look a little closer at those fees. Your company created your data, and you’re paying your storage provider to hold onto it. But once they have it, all of the Big Three charge different combinations of fees for taking your data out, moving it around (even within their own systems), or even just asking for an inventory list of what you have stored in their cloud. . Your data is supposed to help you make money, but your storage provider is nickel-and-diming you for using it. That hardly seems right!

SO WHAT’S THIS ALL MEAN?

On-premises storage is the IT equivalent of running your own coal furnace. Amazon, Google and Microsoft seem inexpensive with “micro charges” that are fractions of pennies. But when you start multiplying those fractions by millions and billions, these costs add up to real money and have an impact on your bottom line!

Wasabi doesn’t have those mind-bendingly complex storage tiers, and offers the fastest, most accessible kind of data storage at a significantly lower cost. I’m pretty darn good at math, but I don’t think it’s all that hard in this case. If you want to slash costs, step up your performance, and make your job easier, Wasabi hot cloud storage seems like a no-brainer. It’s time to migrate.