The Top Cloud Storage Use Cases in Education

Can you feel it? That familiar chill in the air. The pool floats and beach umbrellas disappearing from store shelves. Yes, summer is coming to a close and the back-to-school rush begins anew. As a new school year edges closer, last year’s problems creep back into view. For IT teams at universities and private and public school systems, this means addressing data, user, and security challenges that seemed to go away with the class of 2023.  

At Wasabi, we empower education IT teams to overcome their biggest data storage hurdles. If your organization is looking to graduate to a new class of high-performance cloud storage that won’t break your budget, here are four ways Wasabi can help.  

1. Media storage 

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

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.  

2. Surveillance storage 

Surveillance initiatives have exploded across educational institutions over the last few years. In fact, 91% of public schools in the 2019-2020 school year were utilizing security camera systems.  

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’s Surveillance Cloud product 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).   

3. 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.” 

4. Archive storage 

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 can be pivotal. The ability to recall data at a moment’s notice can dramatically speed up information gathering and the pace of progress.  

The Hotchkiss School felt this firsthand. The 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.” 

Wasabi’s lack of egress fees 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 university’s budgets always stay within reach.  

Conclusion

Empowering educators and places of learning has always been part of Wasabi’s mission. 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.