The Top Cloud Storage Use Cases in Education

Education’s data demands are growing—fast. 

From massive media files and research archives to surveillance footage and cloud-based learning platforms, educational institutions are generating more data than ever before. Managing that data securely, affordably, and at scale is now a top priority for IT teams at schools, colleges, and universities across the country. 

Whether you’re backing up mission-critical systems, storing decades of research, or expanding your remote learning infrastructure, cloud storage plays a pivotal role in keeping your institution running smoothly. But not all cloud storage is created equal—and with limited budgets and complex user needs, schools need a solution that’s cost-effective, easy to manage, and built to scale. 

That’s where Wasabi comes in. Let's explore six of the top cloud storage use cases we’re helping schools and universities solve every day. 

1. Backup storage  

A university’s data is one of its most precious assets. It can encompass everything from faculty lesson plans and independent research data to student records. For large universities, the stratification of data poses a risk to overall security and makes ensuring backup protocols extremely difficult. In the event of a ransomware attack, it is essential that an institution has a reliable (and, ideally, immutable) backup of critical data to recover from and maintain business continuity.  

This is exactly the situation Cornell University found itself in. Their backup strategy used to rely on a combination of solutions to back up different IT systems, hypervisors, and servers. But these methods were complicated and unreliable with a higher failure rate than could be tolerated.  

The IT team replaced four backup solutions with one: Veeam Backup & Replication with cloud storage provided by Wasabi. “Being able to back up our entire IT infrastructure under a single pane of glass is huge,” said Chris Garlington, system administrator in the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University. “But being able to tell leaders in the business college that we can recover their data almost instantly and maintain business continuity is even better.” 

2. Media storage  

Video is becoming vital to the way students and educators engage at school. Through sports teams, film, and communications programs, educational institutions are generating more multimedia assets than ever. And these files demand the largest amounts of space, eating up on-premises capacity.  

A cloud-hosted storage repository for media assets allows arts-focused colleges and media-focused departments the ability to retain media archives affordably and scale their storage as their content needs change. New adopters can add cloud storage to their existing archived data from their existing archive infrastructure, relieving overburdened systems.  

As digital content continues to grow in usage and importance, the cloud has emerged as an affordable option to park archival content in lieu of more analog formats like LTO tape. With a comprehensive cloud or hybrid cloud storage solution, footage from sporting events, campus life, and other activities can be accessed and utilized at any time.  

Wasabi offers a scalable solution that’s trusted by some of the biggest names in sports and entertainment. Our bottomless storage can serve as additional capacity for legacy on-premises storage, extending the lifecycle of existing storage hardware. Wasabi also interoperates seamlessly with top Media Asset Managers (MAMs), including iconik and Imagen, that make finding and organizing your content a breeze. 

3. Data archives for research and university records 

Universities often function as repositories for large swaths of archival data. Maintaining these assets on-premises can be time-consuming, and storing archival assets in cold cloud storage can result in days-long retrieval when it comes time to access your data.  

For research-intensive institutions, this data can represent significant capital investment in their faculty. These organizations treat their research data as their intellectual property (IP) and view it as the integral asset that it is. Research groups within the university system have gone on to patent technologies worth billions of dollars. Preserving that data to the highest degree possible is paramount.  

It’s not just research data that holds long-term value for institutions. Digitally archived primary sources are imperative to higher education. These artifacts are “the raw material of history” and the foundations for scholarly research. Colleges and universities make their name as the keepers of important primary texts such as photographs and written accounts that scholars will flock to from all over the world. Digitizing what you can ensures the preservation of these records for future generations and makes them available to new audiences.  

The Hotchkiss School, an independent boarding school, treats their Wasabi storage as an active archive. “It’s constantly being used for data retrieval rather than retrieving files from a local storage system on-premises,” said Kevin Warenda, Director of Information Technology Services at The Hotchkiss School. “If we need to restore files down, we could easily copy individual files or full backups from Wasabi to our server cluster.”  

Our no egress fee policy takes the guesswork out of data retrieval. Other cloud archive tiers charge exorbitant fees to recall data, making it difficult to predict an organization’s cloud storage fees month-to-month. Wasabi keeps cloud archive storage predictable, so your university’s budget always stays in bounds.  

4. Surveillance storage  

Surveillance initiatives have exploded across educational institutions over the last few years. In fact, according to a 2024 survey, upwards of 90% of public schools were utilizing security camera systems.  Universities often have their own police forces, creating additional surveillance footage through body-worn cameras and vehicle-mounted cameras.  

Like all multimedia, surveillance data is very demanding of storage capacity. On top of this, surveillance footage often comes with its own set of regulations: how long it must be stored, compliance with industry standards, and accessibility requirements. Retention is especially important, as keeping in good standing with these requirements can be burdensome to on-premises storage footprint. Such was the case for Catawba College who, prior to switching to Wasabi, was forced to discard any footage older than just two weeks.  

Wasabi Surveillance Cloud is custom-built to integrate into existing storage arrays and Video Management Systems (VMS) and automatically tier footage off to the cloud for secure storage. Wasabi is cost effective enough to retain surveillance data well beyond standard 90-day rates, and it’s also performant enough to reliably recall that footage from the cloud at a moment’s notice (without paying hefty egress fees).    

5. Empowering remote learning 

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly 2/3 of students participate in fully remote learning, while 1 in 2 students have at least one online class in addition to their in-person classes. With more remote avenues for learning comes more unstructured data, all of which needs to be backed up and protected. 

Student work and faculty documents living in the popular file sharing destinations like Microsoft 365 are still vulnerable to data loss through human error or malicious action. Creating a backup of this data ensures that remote learners and educators’ hard work won’t be lost.  

6. Eliminating shadow IT 

Universities are often more siloed than they initially appear. Different colleges across a university, and sometimes even departments within, work from their own budgets and handle their own technology purchases, which can lead to redundancies unseen by the greater faculty. This “shadow IT” makes it difficult for central IT to manage budgets and harder to identify and solve IT issues, and can even make a university more vulnerable to cyber threats.  

Cloud storage is an easy opportunity for a university to centralize and streamline their IT. Centrally managed cloud storage can be bought and apportioned to departments and colleges as needed without the departments contaminating each others’ data. Not only does it simplify operations and create fewer points of vulnerability for hackers to exploit, but bulk purchases of cloud storage can often be procured at a discount, saving the university in unneccessary IT costs.  

Centralizing cloud storage can even be a profit center for the university. Many organizations, including Cornell, employs their central IT like an internal managed services provider (MSP) that bills each department individually for their individual services.  

Wasabi Account Control Manager offers the centralized control universities are looking for to streamline their storage and eliminate the need for shadow IT. With top-down visibility, automated invoicing, and usage alerts, Wasabi Account Control Manager makes it easy to provision cloud storage for multiple, separate accounts.   

Conclusion 

Empowering educators and places of learning has always been part of our mission at Wasabi. From direct support through the Honor Roll program to providing cloud storage that schools of all sizes rely on—from the Ivy League to regional charter schools. It’s our duty and privilege to service this essential industry.