Tiered Storage Is Relief for Battered IT Budgets

Hot Storage Pricing Can Leave You Cold

Object storage in the cloud is attractive because of its infinite scalability and built-in sharing capabilities. But with the kind of storage growth rates being forecast, it can quickly get costly. Most organizations keep too much data in object storage, also considered hot storage, which stores frequently used data near the edge for rapid retrieval.

Current financial and active customer data usually needs to be kept close for quick access, but once accounts have aged for a quarter or two, old data can safely be moved offline. A lot of active data resides on high-speed memory or flash storage, which can run organizations more than $100 per gigabyte. Though most cloud infrastructure providers don't charge customers to upload data, they do impose egress fees of 8 to 12 cents per gigabyte to move data -- adding even more to your data storage costs.

Furthermore, most organizations need quick access to no more than 10% of their data, experts say. Most data can be safely moved to less expensive media offline and offsite, known as cold storage, rather than stay in the cloud 24/7. And by comparison, the per-gigabyte cost of cold storage is as low as pennies to the dollar per terabyte of storage since it uses cheaper data storage mediums such as backup tapes and data is kept offline in an inactive state until needed.

Tiered Storage Saves More Than Money

There are other risks to keeping too much data in hot storage. Ransomware — which accounted for more than a third of all cyberattacks in the first eight months of 2020, Infosecurity Group reports — can bring an organization to its knees by encrypting its most vital data resources. Malwarebytes reports that 22% of the small and medium-sized organizations affected by ransomware attacks that it surveyed were forced to shut down immediately. Large businesses, municipal governments and universities have been severely disrupted by ransomware, too. Backing up data to offline, air-gapped storage that isn't connected to the internet can cut down recovery time considerably.

Optimizing Cost and Availability

Taken together, Iron Mountain's Iron Cloud^®Object Storage, Iron Cloud^® Secure Offline Storage and Data Restoration and Migration Services provide end-to-end data storage solutions that optimize cost and availability. Cloud-based Object Storage provides a content repository for active data that enables rapid retrieval of mission-critical data.

Secure Offline Storage stores infrequently accessed inactive data offline on air-gapped tape for long-term retention and protection from ransomware while also providing data retrieval via the cloud.

Data Restoration and Migration Services tie it all together by providing a way to migrate data to the cloud and manage legacy tape catalogs and libraries that include fully-managed restoration services should you need to retrieve old data at some point.

Iron Mountain’s technology agnostic approach to data protection makes it easy to integrate our solutions within IT ecosystem, yet unlike other cloud providers and hyperscalers, Iron Mountain doesn’t charge egress fees, making it easy to move your data to the most cost-effective data storage tier based on your business needs while still ensuring it remains accessible at all times.

There's no magic sword for slaying the storage beast, but tiered storage can help IT leaders sleep better knowing that they're getting the biggest bang for their buck.