Second-Gen Cloud Storage Marks Return to Simple Storage Services

This study was published on January 30, 2020 and written by Jerome M. Wendt, president and founder of DCIG, LLC.

Second-generation Cloud Storage Marks Return to Simple Storage Services

Simple storage services. Go ahead. Repeat it. Simple storage services. That phrase sounds remarkably warm and inviting to any companies looking to use any cloud storage service. After all, those three words serve as the basis for the acronym that Amazon uses for its object-based storage offering, S3.

Therein lies the rub. One may not find these so-called simple storage services so simple anymore. A close examination of any of the prominent public cloud storage offerings quickly reveals how complex they can and have become. That complexity stands in contrast to how offerings from second-generation cloud storage providers mark a return to simple storage services.

All Cloud Storage Accessible via the Cloud
The largest public cloud providers often get a foothold in organizations by first providing them with cloud storage services. Whether that be Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure, they each deliver cloud storage.

Each provider bases its respective storage services on an object-based storage platform. Using this approach, organizations may write, read, change, and delete data stored in the cloud over standard internet protocols (HTTP). In this sense, all first- and second-gen cloud storage providers offer and use object-based storage platforms.

Cloud Storage Providers Diverge
It is also at this point where commonality between first- and second-gen cloud storage providers begins to end. The divergence stems, in part, from the technical features and functionality available from these 2 classes of cloud storage providers.

The largest first-gen cloud storage providers typically offer at least 3 tiers of object-based storage. In the case of AWS S3, it currently offers six tiers of its object-based S3 storage. In contrast, second-generation cloud storage providers such as Wasabi only offer one.

The rationale for this divergence stems from what each generation of cloud storage provider wants to accomplish. First-gen cloud providers treat their cloud storage platform as a launching point to them delivering their other cloud services.

These other services include analytics, compute, databases, networking, and security, among others. As such, each one hones its cloud storage offering to best deliver its other cloud offerings. Over time, they have created multiple different storage tiers to satisfy the needs of their other cloud services.

Second-gen Cloud Storage Providers
In contrast, second-gen cloud storage providers focus on providing one cloud storage tier. They design this tier to meet the needs of the most capacity-intensive applications that organizations possess – data archival and backup.

Second-gen providers create a single cloud storage tier that addresses the needs of these two types of applications. This tier offers the features that organizations most desire to confidently store this type of data on it. This feature set includes availability, cost, performance, reliability, security, and simplicity, among others.

Second-gen cloud providers also do not currently charge fees for other related services such as first-gen cloud providers do. For example, first-gen cloud providers may charge data access fees, data transfer fees, and egress fees, among others. These fees appear anytime an organization needs to extract data from the cloud or move it.

A Return to Simple Storage Services
Organizations of all sizes initially adopted cloud storage largely due to its quick, easy, and economical access. However, these same organizations never anticipated needing to dedicate time and staff to manage their cloud storage. To keep their cloud costs low, they must create and manage policies that place data across these multiple storage tiers. They did not sign up for that overhead. Instead, they want to get back to what they originally signed on to the cloud for: simple storage services.

Second-gen cloud storage providers deliver on that requirement. They provide one tier of storage at one price without all the hidden fees and behind-the-scenes policy management.

Granted, their storage offerings may not meet the needs of every organization and every application. However, their offerings more than satisfactorily meet the needs of archival and backup data. At the same time, these offerings simplify management, improve performance, and likely lower costs. Those features represent the type of simple storage services to which organizations want to return and which is again available to them.