Breaking Free from Azure: How ProCloud Cut Cloud Storage Costs 4x with Wasabi

For nearly a decade, ProCloud has built its reputation as a progressive IT services provider in Ireland, delivering modern private data centers and services powered by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Microsoft technologies. The company’s mission is to give enterprises the performance, security, and resilience they expect from private infrastructure, while still enabling the scalability and convenience of cloud services. 

But as ProCloud’s Technical Director Brian Supple explained, the economics of cloud storage were becoming an obstacle rather than an enabler. 

“At first, using Microsoft Azure for backups seemed fine, but costs quickly skyrocketed,” Supple said. “Every read or write was billable, and with millions happening daily, those small charges added up fast.” 

That billing model—perhaps too familiar to anyone who has worked with a hyperscale cloud provider—created headaches for ProCloud and its customers. What appeared cost-effective on paper quickly became unpredictable and expensive in practice and ProCloud began considering Azure storage alternatives.  

When small fees become big problems 

ProCloud’s business revolves around services such as high availability, disaster recovery, data protection, and cyber recovery. For some customers, that means updates every ten minutes, around the clock. Multiply that by dozens of enterprise clients, and you’re looking at millions of read/write operations each day. Azure’s pricing structure meant each one of those operations carried a cost.

Even more frustrating was the unpredictability. One month might include a surge of restores or testing cycles, and the next month had relatively little. The results were bills that fluctuated wildly, often reaching levels that customers hadn’t budgeted for. To address this constant unpredictability, Supple considered hyperscale cloud alternatives, including Wasabi.  

“With Microsoft, we had no control over the costs,” Supple recalled. “It was impossible to predict the bill when millions of writes happened daily. With Wasabi, we know exactly what we’ll pay.” 

Wasabi’s simpler, less costly cloud storage changes everything 

The turning point came when ProCloud evaluated Wasabi, an affordable cloud object storage platform which was already becoming popular in Ireland’s healthcare and public sector markets. The Wasabi appeal was immediately apparent, with its highly performant hot storage with no egress or API fees. 

ProCloud purchased a petabyte of Reserved Capacity Storage (RCS), paired with Wasabi Account Control Manager (WACM) to segment and manage data for its many enterprise clients. The approach allowed ProCloud to divide that capacity into isolated “buckets” for each customer, ensuring both efficiency and security. 

The migration itself was straightforward. Rather than incurring the fees that Azure would charge to move existing data off the platform, ProCloud simply redirected all new backups to Wasabi’s fixed-price cloud storage. Existing Azure data was left to age out under existing retention policies, as static, untouched data that was no longer generating costly fees. 

Beyond backup: new use cases 

While backup and recovery were the initial drivers, ProCloud soon found additional ways to leverage Wasabi. Some enterprise customers, especially in sectors like construction and utilities, were generating massive volumes of video and drone imagery. 

Traditionally, that data was stored on on-premises servers, and it was consuming space at unsustainable rates. Wasabi Cloud NAS offered the alternative of an affordable, scalable repository that could be accessed like a local drive, complete with immutability to aid compliance. 

“Customers don’t want to dump their footage into a black hole,” Supple said. “With Cloud NAS, they can store it securely, map it to their network, and know it won’t change.” It was a simple answer to a growing problem for ProCloud’s customers.  

Counting the savings: cloud storage for service providers 

The numbers speak volumes. With Wasabi, ProCloud has cut storage expenses dramatically, and the cloud solution has become an essential component in the company’s services.  

And the benefits extend beyond cost. Freed from the concern over unpredictable bills, ProCloud can now test backups more frequently, perform restores with confidence, and help customers plan IT budgets with certainty. 

Lessons for service providers everywhere 

ProCloud’s journey makes it clear that with cloud storage, what you see on the pricing calculator is rarely what you pay. The hidden costs of data movement, retrieval, and operations can become much greater than the cost of the raw gigabytes themselves. 

“Microsoft charges for everything—writing, reading, copying, moving data. Even restores increase the monthly bill,” Supple pointed out. “With Wasabi, it’s all included in a fixed cost.” 

For managed service providers, predictability isn’t just a financial perk. It’s integral to delivering services that boost profits and build long-term trust with clients. By eliminating variable transaction fees, Wasabi enabled ProCloud to align its costs with its value proposition of dependable, enterprise-grade services at a sustainable price point. 

Looking ahead 

ProCloud continues to see strong demand for Wasabi’s S3-compatible storage and expects interest in Cloud NAS to grow as data from drones, cameras, and IoT devices explodes. With reserve capacity providing transparency in both usage and cost, the company is confident in its ability to scale without surprises. 

Equally important, Wasabi’s compliance with European data residency and GDPR requirements makes it a natural fit for ProCloud’s public-sector clients.

A clear win 

For ProCloud, the move to Wasabi wasn’t about performance benchmarks or unique features. It was about solving the fundamental problem of bringing cloud costs back under control. 

Azure’s complexity and hidden fees had made storage an unpredictable burden. Wasabi restored simplicity, transparency, and affordability. And in doing so, it freed ProCloud to focus on what it does best—helping enterprises modernize their data centers with confidence. 

As Supple put it, “With Wasabi, the service is the same, the performance is the same. The difference is we can manage and control the costs. That was the issue with the public cloud—the bill was only going one way. Wasabi gives us that control back.”