Education
Solving data challenges in education with a new class of cloud storage
Education in the 21st century is rapidly becoming digitized. Interactive whiteboards have replaced chalkboards. Students access course materials and submit homework assignments via networked laptops and mobile devices. In higher education, advances in every field of research are filling university and college servers with petabytes (PB) of valuable data.
Like every other industry, data has become the lifeblood of innovation in education. Artificial intelligence (AI) and other new analytics tools are deriving greater insights from Big Data—from helping medical schools discover breakthrough cures to enabling teachers to develop personalized learning based on holistic student assessments.
The challenge is how to keep storage costs down as the value, volume, and velocity of data grows? Smart educators and IT leaders are turning to next-generation cloud solutions like Wasabi hot cloud storage for the answer.
Northeast Wisconsin Technical College Increase Data Security while Reducing Complexity
“The ability to use Wasabi buckets to meet the needs of NWTC’s data protection strategy on a specific schedule was exactly what we needed. Wasabi made it very flexible to achieve these goals.”
— Kevin Swanson, Systems Administrator, NWTC
Application Development
Archiving
Data archives have taken on new meaning in the Cloud 2.0 era, providing incredible new opportunities for educators. Thanks to the breakthrough price-performance of Wasabi hot cloud storage, universities and colleges can pull decades of valuable content from offline archives and share it with their students, faculty, or the world. Wasabi is more than just active archive storage at cold storage prices—it’s faster than active data offerings like AWS S3!
Backup and Disaster Recovery
School records and research data are too precious to lose. However, when dealing with data at petabyte scale, primary storage—whether on-premises or in the cloud—can quickly eat up your IT budget. The exponentially lower cost of Wasabi hot cloud storage makes it an ideal solution as a second or third backup for those already heavily invested in traditional primary storage. When you’re ready, we can help you save on primary data storage, too.
Data Analytics
Data is no good to educators and researchers if they can’t access it quickly. With Wasabi, you get active data storage at inactive archive prices so you can afford to store more data and access it quickly when you need it. Access to more data means more accurate predictions and results.
Wasabi addresses three classes of data storage with one, low-cost, high-performance tier
- Active Data is readily visible to the operating system or application that creates or uses it and is immediately accessible to users.
- Active Archive is stored data that is online and instantly available. It does not need to be restored and rehydrated from an offline or remote source.
- Inactive Archive is stored data that is infrequently used or accessed. It is traditionally archived to tape and stored offsite.
Catawba College Switches Cloud Storage Vendors to Avoid Annoying Transaction Fees
“We were looking for affordable cloud storage that didn’t nickel-and-dime us with transaction fees. Wasabi fit the bill with a reliable platform and the processes we required to guarantee the viability of our data.”
– Shawn Moore, Deputy CIO & Enterprise Systems Architect, Catawba College
Why Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage for Education?
As with nearly every industry today, education is inundated with digital data. From K-12 to college-level, schools and universities are consuming far more storage space than they did just a few years ago. In addition to student records and digital coursework, it is increasingly common for schools to store supplementary material, video lectures, and student productions and performances. Some schools have even gone as far as to create entire digital libraries that are accessible online to students and staff. Perhaps the largest contributor to the data deluge is the research being conducted by universities. Academic and medical studies, by their very nature, often yield huge amounts of data that must be retained for the life of the study… or indefinitely.
On-Premises or in the Cloud?
On-premises data storage isn’t always practical because it’s expensive, has scalability limitations, and can be difficult to maintain. School systems have looked to cloud storage in order to scale and to avoid costs associated with storage hardware acquisition and maintenance. In the long run, cloud storage from first-generation cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud can be just as expensive (if not more so) due to complex storage tiers, data egress fees, and other extra charges.
Wasabi hot cloud storage is built on next-generation cloud technology. With a price that is 80% less than AWS S3—and performance speeds faster than the competition—Wasabi is ideal for budget-constrained schools requiring high-volume storage at an extremely low cost per gigabyte. This breakthrough in price-performance eliminates the need for confusing storage tiers. We offer a single tier of service that is ideal for storing active data, active archives, and inactive archives. We also have no charges for egress or API requests. You pay one set price for the data you store, so your bill is transparent and predictable.
Secure, FERPA and HIPAA Compliance
Due to the open nature of academic institutions, schools face a unique and varied set of security threats compared with other types of organizations. “Threats from within” can include anything from students testing their hacking skills and changing test scores, to unintentional malware infection caused by email phishing attacks or by connected mobile devices that may have been infected off campus.
Wasabi’s “defense-in-depth” security protects against a wide range of threats. Wasabi is deployed in fully secure and redundant data centers that are certified for SOC-2 and ISO 27001 compliance, employs strong authentication and access control, and encrypts data at rest and in transit to prevent unauthorized access or disclosure. We also offer a data immutability option to guarantee that your high-value data cannot be changed, erased, or encrypted by a ransomware attack.
Wasabi hot cloud storage complies with the federally-mandated Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) for the protection of student records, as well as HIPAA and HITECH to comply with data regulations related to student medical records or university research.
Avoid Vendor Lock-in
With Wasabi, schools have an inexpensive and faster alternative to AWS, and no longer have to worry about becoming overly dependent on a single vendor. Wasabi hot cloud storage is designed to be fully compatible with AWS S3, which means that data can be seamlessly transferred to or from the AWS cloud on an as-needed basis.
Wasabi in Action
Education Use Cases
Academic Research
Having the ability to free data from offline or inactive archives is especially beneficial to research universities. By maintaining research data online, a university can make the data available to other organizations or researchers who are working on related projects. Accessing this previously inaccessible data can potentially improve the quality of research and lead to trends or correlations that may have gone unnoticed. However, many academic research organizations simply can’t afford to store and share massive data volumes using traditional on-site storage platforms or costly first-generation cloud storage services.
Active Archive Increases Collaboration and Access to Research
Wasabi empowers research organizations to overcome Big Data storage cost and scalability barriers. Specifically conceived to make storage a commoditized utility like electricity, Wasabi costs 80% less than competitors such as AWS S3, with no charges for egress or API requests. With Wasabi, researchers no longer must make difficult decisions about which data to collect and share, where to store it, or how long to retain it.
Faster with Wasabi on the Internet2 Cloud Exchange
Internet2 members can connect directly to Wasabi via the Internet2 Cloud Exchange. Our peering arrangement makes it easy for Internet2 community members to share large datasets quickly and securely. And with no charges for egress or API requests for accessing your stored data, your costs are more predictable and far less expensive than with first-generation cloud storage providers.
Digital Libraries and Active Archives
Universities and colleges not only need to store vast amounts of unstructured data—video, audio, images—they also want to make them available to students, teachers, and the public. The Berklee College of Music in Boston, for example, has petabytes (PB) of performances from students and faculty spanning decades that make incredible learning tools for today’s aspiring musicians.
These types of large active archives simply weren’t affordable with first-generation cloud storage. To control costs, schools would provide access to smaller collections using more expensive storage tiers, such as AWS S3. The bulk of their archives would be locked away on tape or in inactive archive cloud storage like Amazon Glacier.
With Wasabi, schools no longer have to decide what to lock away and what to share. By enabling three classes of data storage with a single, low-cost, high-performance and highly secure tier of service, Wasabi helps you store for the long term without being penalized for accessing it. With Wasabi, you get active data storage at inactive archive prices.
A.I. and Big Data Analytics
By analyzing vast datasets, researchers and scientists can improve our understanding of the universe, accelerate cures for diseases, and advance weather forecasting and climate modeling, to name just a few examples. Meanwhile, more teachers are relying on AI-enabled teaching assistant programs and advanced data collection and analysis to improve student assessments and help educators identify where students are struggling and adjusting to supplement in those areas.
AI and other Big Data analytics require high-performance compute and high-speed access to vast amounts of data. It can’t be stored away offline or in glacially slow inactive archives. Wasabi is not only faster than competitors, but our Wasabi Direct Connect option enables researchers to connect directly to Wasabi hot cloud storage from their on-premises, collocated data centers (up to 10 Gbps), or even other public cloud providers. Check out our connectivity options.
Physical Security and Video Surveillance
The use of video surveillance in public and private schools and higher education is a sad necessity today. Cameras help to keep students and campuses safe and can be instrumental in bringing perpetrators and bad actors to justice. Unfortunately, high-definition video can eat up storage space fast—many campus police are only able to keep footage for a couple of weeks before they need to erase their drives to make more room. With Wasabi hot cloud storage, you can store more video for longer periods of time. Read more about Wasabi for video surveillance storage.
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