How valuable will your data be tomorrow?

Every day, an estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated—and there are no signs of things slowing down. Data comes from an increasingly vast and diverse array of sources: digital photos and videos; sensors that gather everything from climate information to the number of steps taken per day; posts to social media sites; cell phone GPS signals and much more. 

International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that 80% of all data will be un-structured by 2025. Finding value in unstructured data will be the key to success for many businesses as new data sources grow astronomically. With a spike in people working from home due to COVID-19, using the public cloud for archiving can provide quick and easy access to data. Organizations that require the on-demand capacity and accessibility to support multiple use cases—from data archiving and backup recovery to cloud-based applications and DevOps—will find cloud-based storage to be an ideal solution.

Data archiving entails moving data that is no longer actively used to a separate storage device for long-term retention. It’s used to protect information that isn’t necessarily needed for day-to-day business but is retained for a long period—often for compliance purposes. But what if you also need that data to help train your machine learning platform, to spot patterns and make useless data valuable?

Here are four archive storage use cases: 

• File / Object Archives: An affordable way to store unstructured data for long-term archives or easy remote access
• Backup and Recovery: Off-site, long-term archive of backups with support for backup applications such as CommVault and Veeam
• Media: Video, movies, or other large content that may need access at some point in the future but not frequent
• Internet of Things (IoT): Small data structures from all over the world from IoT or smart devices

Long-term storage solutions can be tailored to equip organizations with the necessary variations in capacity, scalability, availability, and security depending on their needs. Ensuring data protection is crucial, especially now, as cyberattacks have hit hard during the pandemic. Organizations should prioritize storing their long-term data in a secure, high-performance, and low-cost environment.

Flexential archive storage, powered by Wasabi, is a simple and affordable way to store extensive amounts of data, including unstructured data for long-term use, without the complexity and high cost of storage tiers. The new solution, designed to enable businesses to store long-term unstructured data from any source in an affordable, fast and straightforward way, is 80% less expensive than its nearest competitor.

Flexential and Wasabi's joint offering in the Flexential Dallas - Plano data center expands the Wasabi service to the southern and central parts of the United States. This augments Wasabi’s services in Hillsboro (also Powered by Flexential) and Virginia, all connected to the Flexential Interconnection Platform. The Flexential Interconnection Platform allows customers easy access to data centers, cloud services, and the internet, with included Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection.

The combined solution empowers enterprises to store more data for less and reduce IT budgets so businesses can focus their time and capital on other core objectives. It offers more connectivity options at faster speeds for enterprises in close proximity to its respective data centers, additional data center redundancy, automatic data replication and failover services, and faster network access speeds from wherever they are located.