Cutting Costs: How Education Customers Leverage the Wasabi Cloud

On top of providing a high-quality education for hundreds or thousands of students, colleges and universities serve as research bodies, athletic clubs, marketing firms, and physical security administrators. Higher ed IT teams must determine how to support a wide swath of data uses on a budget that could always be a little larger.  

We’ve given educators a simple and affordable cloud storage option from our very earliest days at Wasabi. A recent IDC report even found that Wasabi saves customers an average of $20,500 per 100 TB of data stored. For the most data-dependent use cases, real universities are using Wasabi to transform their data storage and save money while doing so. 

Data archives for research and university records 

Funding for academic research often makes up a significant portion of a university’s spending. For these institutions, research data becomes their intellectual property and an investment that’s worth protecting.  

Storing research data on “cold” archival tiers from hyperscalers may seem like a good deal at first, but the low price per-TB belies a series of expensive hidden fees for access and retrieval that make sharing research data between universities or even just across departments unexpectedly expensive. 

Major SEC university: simplifying cloud storage and empowering access 

A research-intensive university found that their siloed IT stacks across departments made sharing information complicated and expensive: egress fees limited the usefulness of colder tiered storage from public cloud providers. 

With Wasabi, the university was able to lower the total cost of their archive storage and increase efficiencies in accessing research data. Without fees for egress, scholars were able to use data stored in the university’s archives without penalty and freed researchers to pursue their work at will.  

Scalable media storage 

Video is rapidly growing in both volume and significance for many colleges. Attempts to store video using on-premises hardware are doomed to fall into cycles of upgrades and expansions as storage volume inevitably outpaces capacity. Cloud storage offers a solution: a bottomless well of data storage that expands to meet your organization’s needs. 

Bryant University: expanding capacity and bolstering security 

Rhode Island’s Bryant University relied solely on premises-based storage hardware for their growing media library and its backups. Along with the inherent security risks of a backup strategy that foregoes offsite storage, the costs of maintaining an on-premises data center to house a growing content library was becoming too expensive for the university to maintain.  

Wasabi integrated seamlessly with their existing Studio Network Solutions (SNS) storage hardware and Veeam backup software, requiring minimal setup from the team. Not only did they improve their overall security with an offsite, immutable copy of critical content, but the solution ultimately spared Bryant’s annual IT budget from large hardware purchases and decreased the storage burden on their existing hardware while increasing their overall security posture.  

Surveillance storage 

A single surveillance camera running continuously generates mountains of video in just a few days. A fleet of cameras canvassing a large campus—indoors and outdoors—can easily overwhelm a standard on-premises storage system.  

Northeast Wisconsin Technical College: scaling surveillance storage and security 

Northeast Wisconsin Technical College’s (NWTC) surveillance storage was primarily handled on-premises and resulted in repeated loss of footage. Adopting Wasabi immediately eased the burden on their existing Nutanix drives. The team utilized the Wasabi Surveillance Cloud, which seamlessly integrated with the school’s Genetec system to automatically tier aged data to Wasabi for preservation according to the desired retention rate. This new system allowed the NWTC team to store 12x more data in Wasabi than they could on-premises.  

Empowering remote learning 

Remote learning often revolves around a central storage hub like Microsoft 365 where students access lesson documents and upload assignments. Though these platforms are reliable, they are still vulnerable to data loss through accidental deletion, corruption, or malicious action. Creating a secondary copy of this data is an important measure for redundancy and security.  

Charles Darwin University: compliant backups for a distanced campus 

Charles Darwin University serves a rural community where 70% of students never set foot on campus. As such, ensuring access to all through its Microsoft 365 file storage hub is essential, as is keeping that hub backed up and secure.  

Adopting Wasabi was a seamless process for the university as our Hot Cloud Storage easily integrated with their Veeam backup product. The availability of Wasabi’s storage region in Australia allowed the university to comply with their data sovereignty regulations as a storage destination for essential backups.  

Eliminating shadow IT  

Departments within colleges and universities often have their own IT budgets. Though this gives these departments a degree of autonomy, it can also create a “shadow” IT network invisible to and outside the control of central, university-run IT.  

Cornell University: scaling storage with account management 

Cornell University’s central IT operates under an MSP-like system, primarily providing backup and recovery services with a mix of on-premises and cloud-based storage. With services expanding, the small IT team found it difficult to scale with their internal customers. 

The Ivy League university adopted Wasabi Account Control Manager as its management hub. The storage management tool is designed for MSPs to manage multiple storage accounts under a single “control” account. It provides top-down visibility into account activity and automates processes for renewal and billing. The IT team increased their Wasabi footprint and now backs up thousands of Cornell-run servers and their ESX and Hyper-V hosts to our cloud.  

Wasabi Account Control Manager is the only tool for custom-built for simplifying and streamlining account management and billing functions. Central IT managers can separate accounts by department, monitor activity, start free trials, and automate invoicing for all their Wasabi storage accounts under management. It’s a complete solution for IT departments looking to centrally apportion storage to their departments. Start a free trial by contacting our sales team.