Rethinking 3-2-1 Backup for the AI Era: Spicy Bytes with AvePoint

Seven wings, a panel of experts, and one guest who flew in from Australia to endure the spice. In this episode of Spicy Bytes, Wasabi sat down with AvePoint to talk about what happens to the 3-2-1 backup strategy when AI changes how much data you create, keep, and pay for.

Spicy Bytes is Wasabi's video series where experts take on the big questions in data and storage one wing at a time. If you've seen Hot Ones, you know the setup. Each bite is hotter than the previous one and comes with a new question. Hosted by Freddie Kelly, Product Marketing Manager at Wasabi, this episode featured:

• Alyssa Blackburn, Global Program Manager, Information Management, AvePoint

• Alec Garino, Product Strategy Lead, AvePoint

• George Hamilton, Director of Product Marketing, Wasabi

The conversation covers how AI is accelerating data growth, why knowing what data you have matters as much as protecting it, and how the freedom to choose your storage foundation can change the economics of backup, archive, and lifecycle management. Here are some of the highlights.

Treat your data like uranium, not gold

Alyssa's diagnosis of most data strategies starts in the kitchen. You buy a can of soup, you eat the soup, and you keep the can. Organizations do this with information every day. They bring it in and never let it go. But a house is only so big, and there are only so many empty cans you can store. Every one of them costs money to keep.

AI makes it worse, because it reads every can on the shelf, including the old, stale content, and gives back poor results. People look at those results and ask why anyone sold them on AI in the first place. Alec pointed out that keeping more data doesn't make you better prepared or your AI any smarter. Someone must keep deciding what's worth holding onto.

Alyssa shared a line she wishes she'd written: for years we treated data like gold, and we should treat it like uranium. Gold means you want as much as you can get. Uranium means you want the least you need to get the result.

The price pressure makes that determination urgent. George said drive shortages and supply chain problems are pushing storage costs up on-prem and in the cloud, and most people expect that to last through 2027 and into 2028.

How much of your data is dark?

Dark data is information you store but never analyze, so you can't say what's in it or what it's worth.

The 2026 Wasabi Global Cloud Storage Index surveyed more than 1,700 IT decision-makers worldwide. Respondents' estimates of how much of their data is dark ran from 25% to 74%. Even at the low end, this means you don't know your data well enough.

AI has made this harder to ignore. George used to tell people to delete anything in SharePoint older than a year. Now he stops to ask whether old Zoom and voice recordings could train a customer service chatbot. Age alone is no longer a safe test.

Context matters more than the date. A three-year-old training video might be the best one your company ever produced, and the template for every training since. You can't delete that. Ask why a file was created, how it's used, and who depends on it. And when you do need the data, you shouldn't wait hours for it or pay a surprise fee to get it.

The 1 in 3-2-1 matters more now

The 3-2-1 rule goes back to tape and on-prem backup: three copies of your data, in two environments, with one copy kept offsite. Alec explained why it has moved from a legacy talking point back to the front of people's minds.

AI multiplies productivity, and risk. One misconfiguration or one mismanaged permission can delete or change data very quickly. Add a rogue AI agent or a regional cloud outage, and you need an isolated copy outside your environment, one you control no matter what happens to everything else. That copy lets you recover and keep operating.

Not every file needs the same protection, and George said that's where Wasabi gives you room to choose. Wasabi Object Lock may be all some data needs. For the data that matters most, Wasabi Covert Copy™ creates a hidden, immutable copy, a virtual air gap that stays invisible to most users and takes more than one person to unlock. Each is a knob you can turn to match how valuable the data is and how much protection it needs.

Freedom to choose your storage

Pairing data intelligence with the freedom to pick your storage can save an organization millions. Alyssa recently ran an estimate for a European organization and came up with €2.5 million in savings over three years, before counting anything they could delete outright. Organizations typically aim to cut 50% or more, she said, and AvePoint has delivered on that.

Roughly half of public cloud storage spending goes to fees rather than capacity, according to the Cloud Storage Index. Eliminate those fees and you can keep more of your data, protect it better, and avoid surprise bills. A panelist who once worked at a cloud cost optimization company said that when finance teams talk to IT, the issue they raise most often is how unpredictable the bill is. You can't budget for a number you can't forecast.

Size doesn't change the logic. A small shop and one of the largest financial institutions face the same problems on very different budgets, and cheap storage only helps if your data can get into it at scale.

More from the episode

Freddie asked what enterprises get from a single platform for data resilience and intelligent data management that they don't get from two tools bolted together. He also asked how managed service providers (MSPs), who often work with far smaller teams and budgets, can deliver the same intelligent data management and AI readiness and build a reliable service around it.

The final question was who wins three years from now: the companies that bought more storage or the ones that figured out what was worth keeping. Alec says you won't have to wait three years to find out. Alyssa had advice on where to start, and George closed on the trade-off storage admins live with every day: how much data to retain against what it costs. You can catch the answers to all of these in the full episode.