Cloud Storage Simplified: Wasabi’s Innovative Alternative in a Hyperscaler Market

Exponential growth of data and increasing reliance on digital platforms are pressuring organizations to ensure their IT infrastructure can keep up with the speed of innovation and growth required by modern digital apps and services, specifically when it comes to the data storage these apps depend on. IDC’s Storagesphere estimates that the global installed base of stored capacity will grow from 6.7 Zettabytes in 2023, to 15.8 Zettabytes by 2028, representing a compound annual growth rate of 18.7%. Now more than ever, investing in efficient, performant storage solutions is crucial as enterprises face the challenge of storing increasingly large volumes of data for extended periods while balancing accessibility, security, compatibility, cost efficiency, and sustainability.

Cloud object storage has emerged as a solution that addresses these challenges, enabling companies to store, protect, and access vast amounts of data and unstructured content. This article will look at some of the top buyer considerations when it comes to cloud object storage, how user preferences may change depending on the use case, and what makes Wasabi different from legacy hyperscaler solutions from providers like AWS, Azure, or Google.

What's new in the cloud object storage market and why does Wasabi matter?

In a market where the top 5 legacy hyperscalers control 80% of the overall market share, Wasabi focuses on disrupting industry standards regarding pricing, billing, and fee structures when it comes to cloud object storage. Wasabi Technologies was founded in 2017 with the purpose of creating a more flexible, cost-effective storage service in a market with very few competitive alternatives. From the outset, Wasabi’s mission has been to store the world’s data by focusing on just one thing – delivering a simple, secure, high-performance cloud object storage service. This approach challenged traditional hyperscaler service models, which were comprised of dozens of cloud services across compute, storage, networking, and SaaS, all based on complex services tiering and billing models.

Wasabi has now grown to over 100,000 customers, 15,000 partners, and almost 2 Exabytes (EB) of storage capacity under management within 15 global storage regions. Wasabi’s customer base spans all major industries, including healthcare, public sector, education, and media and entertainment, which can all benefit from Wasabi's focus on affordability, data security, and regulatory compliance.

This rapid growth and success in a market dominated by multi-billion-dollar incumbents is the best indicator of why Wasabi matters – its service addresses a critical market need for cost-effective, multicloud storage options outside the top two or three hyperscalers.

What makes Wasabi different from legacy cloud storage providers like AWS, Azure, or Google?

The standard approach taken by hyperscalers and other major cloud storage providers includes tiered storage offerings with complex fee structures based on variable rates like data access, API operations, and egress. Wasabi pioneered a new approach to cloud object storage pricing, based on flexible terms, no egress or API fees, and a single-tier offering with high-speed access for all users and workloads. This approach, which contrasts sharply with the de facto standards of the industry, makes Wasabi an appealing alternative for businesses looking to lower their cloud storage costs, or adopt a multicloud storage strategy, without sacrificing performance, interoperability, or scalability.

Below is a quick summary of the key differentiators between Wasabi and leading hyperscaler alternatives:

In addition to differentiating around price, fee structures, and access, Wasabi also seeks to add value across several other service dimensions, including:

Data security

In recent years, data security has seen a drastic increase in importance across industries as organizations and enterprises seek to adopt cloud infrastructure solutions. According to Wasabi’s Cloud Storage Index, 42% of respondents rank data protection and security within their top 3 most important considerations when choosing a cloud service provider. Wasabi focuses on 4 key areas of functionality when it comes to data security and resilience:

1. Availability: Wasabi provides 99.99% data availability

2. Durability: Wasabi provides 11 nines of data durability

3. Immutability: Object Lock from Wasabi is free, with no hidden fees or API request charges

4. Replication: Object Replication can be crucial for disaster recovery strategies without transfer costs or fees

In addition to these focus areas, Wasabi is committed to innovating beyond industry standard features, with capabilities like Multi-User Authentication (MUA), which requires account alterations or deletions to be verified by multiple users, adding another layer of prevention against malicious attack or accidental deletion of data. These robust security measures ensure that Wasabi not only meets but exceeds the expectations of organizations of all sizes looking to safeguard their data in an increasingly complex digital landscape.

Partner focused integrations

The 2024 Wasabi Cloud Storage Index reveals that integration with thirdparty apps and partners is the #1 most important vendor selection criteria when buyers evaluate a cloud storage service. An important factor to keep in mind, as cloud object storage is almost always leveraged as a key ingredient for workloads like backup, active archiving, cloud tiering, or offsite data migration. Wasabi takes a significantly different and more collaborative approach to technology partnerships and integrations than hyperscaler alternatives. With over 15,000 partners, Wasabi’s model is uniquely partner-centric. Wasabi focuses exclusively on delivering cloud object storage, allowing partners to integrate higher-level infrastructure and software applications to deliver unique services. On the other hand, hyperscalers like AWS and Azure offer dozens of cloud services across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS ecosystems, which can make it difficult for partners to differentiate or add value for their customers.

Wasabi’s Account Control Manager further underscores our commitment to empowering partners, by providing a no-cost (free) tool specifically designed to help partners manage their multitenant storage environment and subaccount structures. By fostering a strong collaborative approach via partner solution delivery, Wasabi positions itself as a key ingredient across a wide ecosystem of partner developed and delivered cloud services. Ultimately, Wasabi’s focus on storage allows partners to add value without the risk of competitive overlap.

Sustainable cloud services delivery

According to the Wasabi 2024 Global Cloud Storage Index, sustainability ranks among the top three most important considerations for buyers when choosing a cloud storage service. Wasabi is committed to providing transparent metrics around carbon emissions for all customers and partners. Leading hyperscalers like AWS also offer sustainability tools to help businesses measure their carbon footprint, however, access is typically restricted to existing customers meeting specific usage thresholds. In contrast, Wasabi provides everyone with a transparent, accessible, web-based carbon calculator. Furthermore, Wasabi users have access to even more granular sustainability tools, specifically an invoice-based carbon calculator supported by Zero Circle.

Wasabi’s focus on just storage is another big part of its sustainability story. The majority of Wasabi’s underlying hardware footprint consists of HDDs, which are inherently power efficient in terms of their wattage and cooling requirements. This makes Wasabi’s storage vaults very efficient by default – we aren’t running and cooling power-hungry GPUs and CPUs. In other words, Wasabi’s architecture is purpose built to sustainably store data at exabyte-scale.

Innovative cost and billing structure

Price is always a top considered factor for cloud storage buyers, especially considering 53% of organizations exceeded their public cloud storage budget last year (2023). Wasabi is unique in its approach to storage pricing, eliminating all API and egress fees, providing a cost-effective and predictable solution for customers. Competitors in the market do not share this approach, charging for specific features, network traffic, and API functionality in most cases.

The best way to illustrate this differentiation is through a real-world scenario. Let’s look at the annual total cost of ownership (TCO) for 1 PB of data stored in Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage vs. AWS S3 Standard:

*Will vary based on average object size, here we estimate average object size of 1MB

This scenario shows how annual TCO can increase materially due to fee structures. It is also important to remember that Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 controls over 50% of total market share and has become the de facto standard for cloud object storage with its S3 API. In other words, AWS represents the incumbency in cloud storage – a pricing benchmark against which all other providers, including Wasabi, are measured.

It’s not always either/or...

Though Wasabi and hyperscalers like AWS and Azure all operate in the same market and are evaluated competitively by customers and partners, we often see users deploy multiple cloud object services side-by-side. Survey findings from Wasabi’s Cloud Storage Index showed that 57% of organizations use multiple public cloud storage providers. This multicloud approach to storage is driven by an organization’s need to match the right storage service to the right workload or application. This requirement for flexibility depending on workload makes Wasabi a critical component of many organization’s multicloud strategy, regardless of whether or not a hyperscaler is utilized for other elements of the stack. For example, many organizations are utilizing a multicloud approach when it comes to backing up their data, as it provides a comprehensive solution that eliminates a single point of failure that could be experienced when using a single cloud target. If an organization experiences an outage with one provider, they can still access and recover business-critical data through a multicloud approach.

The surveillance and physical security sector is another example of a market that has been embracing the efficiency and scalability of multicloud infrastructure. Wasabi’s market research shows almost 40% of organizations store more than 400 TB of video surveillance data. These large volumes of surveillance data can be a challenge to store and retain cost-effectively on premises. Increasingly, organizations are turning to cloud storage providers to help with this challenge. In many cases, organizations need a pure-play cloud storage provider like Wasabi to address this specific use case, even if they’ve already deployed hyperscaler solutions for other aspects of their IT infrastructure.

Break the cycle of distrust and choose Wasabi

Wasabi’s market research reveals that while hyperscalers are often perceived as the most secure and reliable choice, user satisfaction can quickly decline when customers are faced with the complexity and unpredictability of their cloud costs and billing structures. Wasabi helps break this cycle by offering a cost-effective solution that matches hyperscalers in performance, security, and scalability while also eliminating these pricing frustrations. In other words, customers who choose Wasabi experience the service performance and availability they expect, at the price they expect – a best-of-both-worlds scenario that doesn’t always happen with the hyperscalers.

With over 100,000 customers, Wasabi’s success is a testament to the market's gradual embrace of more flexible, cost-effective, pure-play platforms which can be tailored to integrate into multicloud infrastructure ecosystems without adding complexity. We’re confident that modern, digital organizations will continue to distribute their data across multiple platforms and services, both on-premises and in the cloud, to achieve the scalability and performance they need. Wasabi remains committed to enabling this shift by ensuring cloud object storage becomes a seamless part of the process.