Page 12 - CT Innovation in Education, July 2021

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Uncovering the Hidden Costs of Cloud Security
As your usage of the public cloud for secure storage expands, so does the expense. Here’s how to optimize your spending.
David Boland
Senior Director of Product Marketing, Wasabi
WHILE THE PUBLIC CLOUD HAS BEEN A BOON
for higher education on many fronts, it has also
become a conundrum, especially when it comes to storage for the purposes of security and safety. As the needs add up, so does the expense.
The first not-so-hidden cost is the baseline cost of data storage. As an example, think about the capacity required to sustain video recordings of people entering and exiting buildings on campus. A network of 100 cameras, each capturing 8 frames per second with a modest resolution of 720 pixels, operating continuously at just medium quality, would require 200 terabytes of capacity. On Amazon Web Services, the cost for storing 200 TB on S3 would be about $56,000 for the year. If the institution were to upgrade to newer cameras capturing 15 frames per second at 1080 pixels, generating five times as much data — a full petabyte — the expense would quintuple, to about $289,000. Microsoft Azure would be slightly under that ($262,000) and Google Cloud a bit more ($327,000).
Second, there is the additional hidden cost of the traditional route those cloud storage providers follow for transactions related to the data. They’ve all predicated the value of their services on fractional pricing (a tenth of a penny for this, a couple of pennies for that) for seemingly insignificant activities, such as egress or API requests.
That was the situation at Catawba College in North Carolina. The school had migrated its backup, archive and disaster recovery data to one of the leading cloud providers. But according to Shawn Moore, deputy CIO and enterprise systems architect, the extra transaction fees quickly turned into an irritant. “These fees look small, but they add up,” he explained. “Suppose you had a huge file that needed to be split up and then recombined. They would charge you to list all the parts of the files, versions, buckets, authorizations ... all sorts of things.” Plus, the fees interfered with how Moore liked to verify his data. “Unless you want to throw your data up there and trust that it all got there, validating got to be expensive,” he noted. “I love to call back the metadata to
verify that file names and file sizes match, but I hated being nickel-and-dimed on every transaction.”
An Always Hot Tier for Less
While any institution wants to make sure it can store data where it’ll be safe and left untouched by disaster or hackers, the approach also needs to be affordable. We believe the legacy providers may have priced themselves out of the reach of higher ed.
Take the situation of Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, a two-year public institution. NWTC adheres to a 3-2-1 backup practice: three copies of data, two on different
The first not-so-hidden cost is the baseline cost
of data storage. As an example, think about the capacity required to sustain video recordings of people entering and exiting buildings on campus. A network of 100 cameras, each capturing 8 frames per second with a modest resolution of 720 pixels, operating continuously at just medium quality, would require 200 terabytes of capacity.
media, and one offsite. Daily, IT does a backup with three tiers of virtual machines, file shares, SQL databases and Salesforce data. Monthly, there’s an offline backup of SQL databases using tape. At some point, IT hopes to incorporate regular backup of Office 365 data too. The college decided to reduce its reliance on tape-based storage, which was costly to expand and upgrade, and replace it over the long-term with cloud storage.
After a careful study, NWTC chose Wasabi for its cloud storage. The same solution was also adopted by Catawba College.
Wasabi provides numerous benefits. The biggest one
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