There are many data storage strategies and solutions available to organizations, both on-premises and in the cloud. Most enterprises deploy a combination of on-prem and public cloud storage. With such a wide variety of workloads, use cases, and data formats that companies need to manage, this type of hybrid or multicloud strategy only makes sense. However, given the differences in price, cost models, accessibility, performance, and security features across all of the various platforms, providers, regions, and tiers of service available, managing a multicloud strategy is not always easy. That said, we think our latest integration with our long-time partner, Spectra Logic can help.

Why a multicloud storage strategy?

Multicloud is an IT strategy that uses multiple public cloud services from different providers. Multicloud adoption is growing among organizations. In the Wasabi 2023 Cloud Storage Index, our new independent survey of 1,000 IT decision-makers, 57% of respondents reported using more than one public cloud storage provider. In Flexera’s 2022 State of the Cloud Report, 89% of respondents said they have a multicloud strategy. There's good reason for these high adoption rates. Executed well, a multicloud strategy can reduce storage costs and complexities by optimizing your entire storage environment across your various workloads and business requirements. Benefits of a multicloud storage strategy include:

• Cost optimization – Using multiple storage providers can help you right-size costs based on use case, how often you access your data, and the value of that data.

• Redundancy and Business Resiliency – Backing up your data to multiple cloud environments can protect you from data loss in the event of service interruptions, natural disasters, or ransomware attacks.

• Flexibility – A multicloud approach provides the agility to move data to the cloud service best-suited for a particular workload depending on any number of factors, including performance, price, the ability to access data with paying additional egress fees, immutability, or certified compliance to industry and government regulations.

The benefits of a multicloud storage strategy

Let’s take a look at how a large organization like a sports team could benefit from a multicloud or hybrid storage strategy. Teams such as the Liverpool Football Club or Boston Red Sox have massive stores of media data that have different storage requirements depending on where a specific asset is in its lifecycle. For instance, raw footage from last night’s game would most likely be stored on-premises, providing the high performance needed for editors in the studio. Highlight reel footage from past games must be archived, but they also may need to be accessed frequently for memory videos or social media throwbacks. A high-performance public cloud storage provider that does not charge egress fees to access that content would be ideal in this case. Lastly, their complete library of game footage, potentially spanning decades, could be found on legacy LTO tape or cold-tier cloud storage to take advantage of the lower cost.

As you can see, there are advantages–both in cost and performance–for using multiple storage media or providers. However, managing a hybrid or multicloud storage environment can get complicated fast.

How to simplify the management of hybrid multicloud storage environments

Each storage provider has its own unique infrastructure, interfaces, tiering options, and management tools, which creates a host of challenges from integration issues to a lack of data mobility and visibility across your entire storage domain. Managing a hybrid multicloud storage environment requires a well-thought-out data management strategy as well as an IT staff with the requisite skills and understanding of the various platforms and providers in use.

Spectra Vail®, from Wasabi technology partner, Spectra Logic, is a breakthrough cloud data management software solution designed to simplify the management of multicloud and hybrid cloud deployments. Vail unifies cloud storage and on-premises infrastructure into a single namespace. This enables legacy and cloud-native applications to take advantage of cloud services no matter where the data resides. Vail facilitates the orchestration of data across multiple clouds and sites to ensure that data resides in the location where it brings the most value at the most optimal cost. From our sports scenario earlier, video assets from on-prem disk storage, cloud object storage, and LTO tape would all be accessible from a single console.

Simplify your storage even more with Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage

Wasabi Technologies and Spectra Logic have had a strong partnership for years and are proud to announce their latest integration of Spectra Vail and Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage. Spectra Vail customers can now take advantage of Wasabi’s low-cost storage service with no fees for egress or API requests, to further optimize data storage costs and accessibility. Vail enables organizations to extend their data centers, unifying on-premises storage with Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage for a modern, scalable hybrid cloud architecture. Thanks to Wasabi’s high performance and unique flat-fee structure, it is an economical solution for both the active archive and long-term “cold” storage use cases from our sports media example – simplifying your storage environment even further.

For more on Spectra Vail with Wasabi, check out our Solution Brief.