The demand for data storage is growing at an unprecedented rate. About 329 million terabytes of data are created daily, according to Statista. IDC forecasts a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23% in new data creation, resulting in approximately 175ZB by 2025.
Understanding the current challenges.
As your organization leverages growing data, you're likely facing several challenges.
Rising costs
Bigger file sizes, more data, and an increased need for multi-region storage are driving up costs. As businesses generate and store vast amounts of information, the demand for scalable storage solutions rises. Additionally, ensuring data availability and redundancy across different geographical locations adds to the financial burden.
Increasing risks
Organizations face increasing pressure to mitigate damage from more frequent outages and ransomware attacks. These disruptions not only risk financial losses but also threaten the integrity and reputation of the affected companies. Businesses must invest in higher replication factors and tiers of storage to safeguard their operations—which gets expensive fast.
Need for speed
Large datasets and expanded access, while intended to enhance operations, are paradoxically lowering productivity and user satisfaction. Upload and download speeds on large files are too slow for many collaborators. This is especially true for international collaboration like post-production work and scientific research. Increasing performance requires more investment for CDNs and higher tiers of storage.
Global access
More global collaboration and regional business expansion necessitate multi-region replication to ensure data availability, redundancy, and seamless user experiences across different geographies. For every storage region added, your cost is multiplicative. Plus, most storage providers charge for making a copy of your data and transferring it to the other regions.
Leveraging AI
AI and ML initiatives require access to archived data to build accurate and robust models. This data serves as a foundation for training algorithms, enabling them to identify patterns, make predictions, and improve decision-making processes over time. By leveraging historical information, AI and ML projects can achieve higher levels of precision and reliability. However, many large enterprises still have this data in cold archive and transferring it to a more active archive can be costly.
ESG initiatives
There is increasing executive and regulatory interest in the reporting and reduction of carbon emissions. Businesses are being urged to adopt more sustainable practices, with many industries facing stricter regulations and oversight. IT leaders are beginning to face pressure to report on carbon emissions and will soon be forced to make significant reductions. It is becoming critical to invest in technologies and strategies to measure, report, and minimize carbon footprint.
The distributed cloud—what you need to know.
Distributed cloud storage offers an attractive alternative to traditional cloud object storage solutions like AWS S3, Microsoft Azure, or budget options like Wasabi. Instead of centralizing data in a single, dual, or multi-region set of data centers, it distributes data across tens of thousands of locations across more than 100 countries.
When traditional providers like AWS discuss ‘distributed storage,’ they typically mean multi-region storage, which involves duplicating data across several data centers within one geographic area to minimize data loss risk and enhance performance. While this method can improve data resilience and accessibility, it significantly increases resource consumption, costs, and complexity. Managing multiple copies across different data centers results in higher storage and egress fees and adds extra operational overhead.
True distributed cloud storage solutions take a different approach by using a network of tens of thousands of storage nodes with underutilized capacity to store data securely and efficiently. This method not only boosts data security and privacy but also guarantees high availability and durability without the extra costs associated with multi-region replication. The efficient, secure, and fast architecture also contributes positively to environmental sustainability.
Globally distributed cloud storage represents the most significant innovation in cloud storage since AWS S3. You can confidently adopt enterprise-grade distributed cloud storage solutions today. Supported by reliable technology and enterprise-level SLAs, these solutions offer robust, scalable, and cost-effective storage you can trust for your data.
Real results with the distributed cloud.
The shortcomings of traditional cloud storage are evident and are going to continue to pose a challenge to efficient business operations. Distributed cloud storage presents a proven alternative with significant benefits.
Want proof? Here are some results from Storj distributed cloud object storage that show how the distributed approach can help overcome the challenges with today's cloud providers and bring significant benefits for your bottom line.
Storj is the largest enterprise-grade distributed cloud storage solution. Organizations like CloudWave, Gabb Wireless, Uninterrupted, the University of Edinburgh, and GBLabs are leveraging distributed cloud storage to set new standards in data collaboration and business continuity.
Significant cost savings.
Storj provides S3-compatible distributed cloud object storage that is incredibly fast and durable with global accessibility. Pay-as-you-go pricing is only $4/TB per month for storage and $7/TB of egress. After switching to Storj customers report cutting their cloud storage and egress costs by up to 90%.
“Storj has an innovative infrastructure that's extremely efficient, which gives our clients 90% cost-savings on storage.”
--Bruce Van Nyl, Cofounder, Inovo
“I continue to get surprised glances from other executives at Gabb when we talk about the economics of Storj.”
--Alen Peacock, Director of Cloud, Gabb
Significant carbon avoidance.
Companies using Storj have also cut their carbon intensity by up to 83%, contributing to a more sustainable IT infrastructure. Storj includes CO2 reporting data through its interface and invoices so CTOs can understand carbon emitted as well as carbon avoided by using Storj.
If all Storj customers were previously using corporate data centers to store their data, to date, those customers have avoided 9,601 metric tons of carbon by switching to Storj. That is about the same as avoiding the use of 1 million gallons of gasoline.
Leading in performance.
Signiant, a leading provider of intelligent file transfer software, integrated Storj with their product, Media Shuttle, which is designed to be an easy, reliable way to send any size file, anywhere, fast. Using Storj, Signiant consistently achieved speeds of about 2.5Gbps per transfer, ranking in the top 1% of all-time Media Shuttle transfers.
"We were initially skeptical about the performance of Storj because it is so affordable. However, we confirmed that customers can achieve multiple multi-gigabit transfers with Media Shuttle and Storj so they can save on cloud storage without compromising on performance.”
--Robert Browne, Founder, VP Global Technology Alliances and Partnerships, Signiant.
By adopting this innovative approach, CTOs and IT leaders can overcome the rising costs, increasing risks, and operational inefficiencies associated with traditional cloud storage.
Ready to learn more about distributed cloud storage? Read the CTO Guide.
