INTRODUCTION
Object storage, often referred to as object-based storage, is a data storage architecture for handling large amounts of unstructured data. Unstructured data is data that does not conform to, or cannot be organized easily into a traditional relational database with rows and columns. Today’s Internet communications data— email, videos, photos, web pages, audio files, sensor data, and other types of media and web content (textual or non-textual)— is largely unstructured.
With its scalable and flexible cost structure, more companies are turning from tape to low-cost cloud object storage for backup of their exponentially growing structured and unstructured data – especially data that may never change or may be accessed infrequently. Cloud-based object storage solutions offer high scalability, moderate performance, low cost and ease of management. In fact, in 2020, Statista found 94 percent of the small sized organizations and 81 percent of the mid-sized and large organizations surveyed worldwide claimed that they had used the cloud for data storage or backup.1
But organizations don’t reap those advantages simply by pushing their data into Amazon S3, Azure block blobs or Google Cloud. They get the most out of cloud storage when they consider and implement architectural changes to fully support its advantages. Careful consideration around technology and deployment will keep you from making costly mistakes, like sending duplicate data to the cloud and storing low-priority data in expensive cloud storage tiers.
This paper explains how you can significantly lower cloud object storage requirements and cost for data protection. With the right practices and technology in place, you can take advantage of object storage in the cloud to lower the overall cost of data protection
