– By Stephen Lucas, Vice President, Product Management at ORock Technologies –
You might remember the famous lyrics from “Hotel California,” which lets listeners know that “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” For many, that best sums up the approach of leading hyperscale cloud companies and their well-honed strategy to hold on to your business for life. Their end goal is to lock in both your applications and data so you are stuck paying for their services.
Let me address the data side and share what to look for when examining strategic options on expanding on-premises storage or making the decision to move your data to the cloud.
There is no doubt that data is driving many of our business decisions on a daily and even hourly basis. The sheer volume of data is continuously increasing and stretching many of the on-premises storage solutions currently in place for organizations.
Some next step questions that come to mind include, How should I expand my data center’s storage footprint? Do I buy more storage hardware? Do I refresh and upgrade storage technologies that are end-of-life for increased capacity or do I move some of my organization’s data to the cloud? Each has it benefits and trade-offs. From an economic and technology consideration, many organizations are seriously looking at which cloud storage solutions are available.
So what are the key considerations you should look for when deciding who the right cloud storage provider is for your organization? At the top of the list is data security. Cloud storage and computing has come a long way and many cloud service providers check the box for stringent security controls. So what else should you look for? Another key criterion is the overall cost of cloud storage.
Do an online search of cloud storage costs and you will quickly find that one of the leading complaints with moving data to the cloud is the surprise charges that hyperscalers tack on and many organizations are unaware of or simply miscalculate. It is easy to be lured in by what seemingly appears to be low per GB monthly storage fee and no upfront cost for data “ingress” to the cloud. That is where the “you can check in any time you like” comes into play.
What if you need that data returned to your data center? Or perhaps moved around in the cloud? The line “but you can never leave” is beguiling – and fits the bill. In many ways, your data is being held hostage. And by that I mean retrieving it back from the cloud, accessing it to use in the cloud or moving within the cloud. These are all likely scenarios where costly fees can be assessed. Those fees can add up fast and lead to unexpected charges and blown IT budgets.
One organization that accumulated excessive fees from the constant movement and retrieval of data was NASA. It faced tens of millions of dollars in early 2020 from unexpected cloud egress fees because of the miscalculation of both the need and the cost of data transfer and egress charges.
How do you leverage all the benefits that cloud storage can provide while protecting your budget? Fortunately, ORock has a cloud storage solution that is not only secure and high performance, but also cost predictable. Why cost predictable? Because ORock charges one fixed price that includes not only your “ingress” but also those intercloud transfer and access costs, and yes, even your “egress” charges to move YOUR data from the cloud to anywhere else it is needed, including back on-premises.
So I have a simple recommendation. Remove those exorbitant fees by cutting ties with your current public cloud provider for a more sensible hybrid cloud option – one that does not include costly egress fees, deposits money in your IT budget and puts a smile on your CFO’s face.
