What Does The Future Hold For Cloud Storage?
Dave Friend is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wasabi. getty  2021 welcomed the 15th anniversary of AWS cloud services and its S3 cloud object storage. I consider the introduction of S3 to be the real beginning of public cloud data storage. Since then, newer market entrants have competed with S3 through price and speed to win over customers, powering a fundamental industry shift. Despite Amazons complexity and prices, its storage revenue was reported in the neighborhood of $15 billion last year, so upgrading or replacing old technology at that scale and changing entrenched business models is no simple matter. In this respect, more recent entrants to the cloud storage market have the advantage of starting with a clean technology slate. The three hyperscalers  AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure  have all adopted a walled garden approach to cloud services and offer hundreds of cloud services in addition to storage. The Multi-Cloud Movement  Customers are becoming increasingly wary of having all their eggs in one basket. This is particularly true with respect to data redundancy, backups and disaster recovery. I was in the data backup business for 10 years with my previous company, Carbonite, and it was an established policy that backups had to be kept on disparate systems that provided as much isolation of backups as possible so that an intruder could not insert ransomware that would encrypt and lock every copy of the data. Consequently, one of the biggest successes of the multi-cloud movement has been the storing of backups or second copies of data in alternate clouds. Storage providers are recognizing the importance of hosting backups and second copies of data from the outset and consequently designing their pricing and business model to fit these applications. The two most important attributes of cloud storage are price and speed. Cloud storage providers will need to focus on driving down costs and making storage faster to remain competitive, all while being closer to their customers. Vendors can help drive down costs and increase agility for their customers by removing large egress fees, implementing data security framework and eliminating storage tiers for fast and easy access. Over the next couple of years, I believe well also see more cloud storage moving toward the edge of the network so they can be closer to their customers, regardless of their location. Its also important to recognize that one pricing plan doesnt work for all customers. Many new vendors are adopting pricing models that allow their customers to benefit from substantial discounts in return for committing up front to a fixed amount of storage. Cheaper data storage also introduces more opportunities for innovation. For example, an AI startup may be able to discover a new capability that wouldn't have been possible had they not had easy access to all of their data. Finally, were seeing backup, which is often considered the most boring of cloud applications, quickly becoming one of its most critical. Whether accidental or malicious, preventing catastrophic data loss is becoming increasingly challenging, especially when defending against ransomware attacks or mitigating the impact of human error. A series of recent ransomware attacks and data breaches have highlighted this critical need if companies want to avoid financial and reputational damage as well as time-consuming outages, and organizations will continue to look for diverse, cost-effective cloud options to store their backup data. As more companies migrate their data to the cloud, the role of vendors will be to give customers a sense of security that comes from not just betting on one cloud solution, and to do so through durability, with availability that doesnt come at an astronomical cost. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives.