S3 Object Storage Without the Outages

Posted on April 24, 2020 Backups & DR

The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the world of work, with millions of Americans now telecommuting for their jobs. According to IT research firm Gartner, 88 percent of organizations have encouraged or required their employees to work remotely.

But there’s one major consequence of this great work-from-home migration: unprecedented strain on IT and cloud computing infrastructure.

Large cloud computing providers such as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform have already encountered scalability issues due to spikes in demand from remote workers:

  • Microsoft Azure saw a 775 percent explosion in use of the Microsoft Teams collaboration platform in Italy. The Teams platform suffered a 2-hour outage on March 16, likely due to this massive surge, that primarily affected users in Europe.
  • On March 26, Google Cloud Platform experienced a 14-hour outage that shut down services such as BigQuery, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Google App Engine. Another brief Google cloud outage on April 8 temporarily blocked Gmail users from receiving emails.

These outages have understandably made many employers nervous about the continuity of their business, should these heavy loads continue to strain cloud providers’ existing resources. Microsoft has already announced that it will prioritize Azure cloud access for first responders, emergency services, and critical infrastructure.

During these uncertain times, having a reliable cloud computing environment is more important than ever before. Availability concerns surrounding the major cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform) have led many businesses to take a fresh look at smaller, more reliable providers for their cloud object storage needs.

What is Object Storage?

The average organization has a lot of data at its fingertips. Yet many have even greater storage requirements, with multiple petabytes (millions of gigabytes) of enterprise data to manage.

What’s more, roughly 80 to 90 percent of this data is unstructured: information that does not adhere to a given model or schema, such as text, images, videos, and audio files. Structured data can be easily stored in a relational database, which stores information in tables and defines the relationships between them. Unstructured data, on the other hand, must use an alternative storage method such as object storage.

Object storage is an approach to data storage that treats data as discrete units known as “objects.” Rather than a file-based hierarchy with multiple layers of directories, object storage systems use a flat hierarchy to reduce complexity and improve scalability.

Each object is a self-contained repository that contains the data, metadata, and a unique ID number. Users can access the object through a REST API (application programming interface) that facilitates rapid search and retrieval. This makes object storage ideal for long-term preservation of unstructured data, as well as scaling to accommodate extremely large quantities of information (1 petabyte and beyond).

Why Use NETdepot’s S3 Cloud Storage?

Given the dominance of Amazon S3 for object storage, why should you go with a smaller cloud storage player such as NETdepot? There are two major reasons, both of which have recently become more important than ever: reliability and affordability.

1. NETdepot is reliable

You might think that large cloud providers are inherently more reliable—but this isn’t always the case. The assumption that AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform are “too big to fail” is a dangerous one that can lead to disaster.

While Amazon S3 has thus far been free from outages in 2020, the service has had its share of problems in the past. In February 2017, for example, an AWS engineer made a typo that brought down S3 for 4 hours, which caused the service’s S&P 500 clients to lose an estimated $150 million. The outage was so severe that Amazon itself was unable to update its own dashboard to inform users about the problem.

During its 20 years in the IT business, NETdepot has perfected its services for a selective list of clientele. NETdepot offers infrastructure as a service (IaaS), colocation, dedicated servers, managed hosting, and cloud services.

With four data centers located in HoustonAtlanta, New York, and San Francisco, NETdepot has the geographic reach your business needs to achieve lightning-fast performance. We guarantee 100 percent uptime service levels, so that our customers don’t face the same risks as they would with a larger cloud storage provider.

2. NETdepot is affordable

Many organizations are highly price-conscious right now as they seek to streamline their budgets and eliminate inefficiencies. The good news: not only is NETdepot more reliable than alternatives like Amazon S3, it can also offer the same high-quality service at lower rates.

For example, storing 210,000 terabytes of data on Amazon S3 would cost roughly $331,000, compared to just $26,000 with NETdepot—that’s savings of more than 80 percent. NETdepot also offers competitive prices for cloud direct connect: as low as $150 per month for 1 gigabit, and just $2500 per month for 40 gigabits.

Want to learn more about how NETdepot can help maintain your business continuity while slashing IT costs? Check out our NETdepot S3 Cloud Object Storage page, including our transparent price calculator. We’re offering free expert support for cloud migrations when you sign up for a new account.

Contact Us Today To Experience How We Can Save You Time, Money And Stress