Understanding the Total Cost of Cloud Replication Beyond Storage Capacity

Cloud replication is the process of creating and maintaining more than one copy of a data set in the same or different storage region. IT managers replicate data to boost application performance, enable high availability, and facilitate disaster recovery. However, a variety of unexpected fees associated with cloud replication services make replication costs far higher than the simple cost of extra storage capacity, which can hinder business development and drastically increase your total cost of ownership (TCO).  

Types of replication 

Replication used to be as simple as inserting a floppy disk into a PC and dragging a file onto it. Today, replication typically uses specialized software to copy data from one device to another. In most cases, those two devices are in different locations as a security and redundancy measure. Increasingly, IT managers perform cloud-to-cloud replication, which copies data between cloud data centers in different geographic regions. 

Why replicate? 

Why should you replicate your data? A cloud data replication strategy might be driven by a number of factors, including: 

• Business continuity, security, and disaster recovery (DR)—Replicating data from one region to another mitigates the risk of data loss in the event of a natural disaster or cyber attack, e.g., ransomware. 

• Cost savings/cross-tier migration—The replication process enables you to shift data from high-cost storage to more economical storage tiers, such as “cold” storage. (However, as our recent blog post reveals, this option is not always as financially rewarding as it first looks.) 

• Performance considerations—Solutions like enterprise resource planning (ERP) may have proximity considerations for certain data sets to deliver high performance. In certain workloads like cloud-based editing, immediate access to cloud-hosted data is essential, and the distance between the user and their data makes all the difference.  

• Data analytics and AI workloads—Analytics and artificial intelligence are best kept separate from production databases. Instead, it’s optimal to replicate data into data repositories that have been set up for analytics and AI workloads, e.g., Snowflake replication. 

Understanding cloud replication costs 

What does replication cost? Hint: it’s more than just the fee you pay for storing a second instance of your data. The hyperscalers, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), all charge you to transport that second copy across the network—at approximately 2 cents per gigabyte (or $20 a terabyte). Depending on how much data you are copying, and which destination region the copy is landing in, that transport fee could end up costing you more than the storage fee for the replicated data itself.  

It doesn’t stop there. Every time you make a replica and put that copy in another bucket in another region, that’s another API PUT request fee per 1,000 objects. Understand that objects and file sizes are not the same thing. You could replicate a 1 gigabyte file, but the cloud platform might split it into 500 2-megabyte chunks, each requiring a separate PUT fee. That can add up quickly.  

In addition to all that, the hyperscalers require that versioning be turned on to enable replication to another region, so in addition to all the other expenses, you now have to store and pay for all the older versions of your data, even if you have no business case or requirement for keeping them.  

Wasabi’s simple, cost-effective approach to replication 

Wasabi’s replication service is simpler and more cost-effective than the hyperscalers. With Wasabi, replication becomes relatively simple: you pay only for storage. There are no fees for data transport or API requests, nor is there a need to switch on versioning for the sake of replication. Your business can take advantage of Wasabi’s global footprint of storage regions to place your data nearly anywhere in the world, all at no additional cost.  

Conclusion 

Cloud replication is essential for business continuity, security, performance, and availability. However, with hyperscalers, the costs of replication can be higher than you expect due to charges for data transmission, API requests, and versioning. Wasabi offers a cost-effective and consistently priced alternative, with no fees for data transmission or API requests, and no requirement for versioning.

Looking to learn more? Read the next blog in our series, How API Fees Like PUT Requests Can Blow Your Backup Budget