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Protect Yourself from Cost Overruns with AWS S3

From Maciej Pocwierz posted on Medium - "A few weeks ago, I began working on the PoC of a document indexing system for my client. I created a single S3 bucket in the eu-west-1 region and uploaded some files there for testing. Two days later, I checked my AWS billing page, primarily to make sure that what I was doing was well within the free-tier limits. Apparently, it wasn’t. My bill was over $1,300, with the billing console showing nearly 100,000,000 S3 PUT requests executed within just one day!"

Editor's note: ...or you can use a cloud storage service like Wasabi that doesn't charge for API requests and sleep better knowing you won't wake up to a massive bill...

AWS owes half a billion dollars in cloud storage patent fight

From Reuters/Blake Brittain originally posted on April 10, 2024 - "Amazon Web Services, the world's largest cloud-service provider, owes tech company Kove $525 million for violating its patent rights in data-storage technology, an Illinois federal jury said on Wednesday.

The jury determined that AWS infringed three Kove patents covering technology that Kove said had become 'essential' to the ability of Amazon's cloud-computing arm to 'store and retrieve massive amounts of data.'"

Editor's note: AWS disagrees with the determination. Shocker...

Wasabi Introduces "Wasabi AiR" - The Industry's First AI-Enabled Intelligent Media Storage

From the press release - " Wasabi Technologies, the hot cloud storage company, today introduced Wasabi AiR ™, the industry's first AI-enabled intelligent media storage. Wasabi AiR combines Wasabi’s high-performance, low-cost object storage with advanced AI metadata auto-tagging and multilingual searchable speech-to-text transcription. Video files uploaded to Wasabi AiR are immediately analyzed and a second-by-second metadata index is created, enabling users to quickly find what they are looking for. Wasabi AiR greatly reduces the cost of metadata creation: with Wasabi AiR, customers pay only for the storage. There is no additional charge for use of the AI."

Editor's note: This is a bold move, bundling [hot] cloud storage with video analysis. The Big 3 charge upwards of $50 to $60/hour for complete analysis of one hour of video. I expect Wasabi to promote an aggressive price in line with their already competitive pricing for standard object storage.

SPONSORED CONTENT

Understand AI Tagging: What is it and how does it work? - Aaron Edell, Wasabi Technologies

"AI tagging is a machine learning process where algorithms recognize the content of unstructured data, assigning relevant metadata tags, markers, or labels making it searchable by key terms. AI tagging scans media such as images, videos, and documents, and quickly identifies and tags valuable moments that content owners may not even know they have." Read the rest of the article here.

Wasabi Acquires GrayMeta’s Curio AI To Take Unstructured Data Out Of The ‘Dark Ages'

In a story by Joseph F. Kover for The Channel Company, Joseph writes - "Cloud storage developer Wasabi Technologies Tuesday unveiled its acquisition of Curio AI, a technology developed by California upstart GrayMeta that uses AI and machine learning to automatically generate a searchable index of unstructured data." 

Opti9 Launches Standalone Ransomware Detection Platform and Managed Services for Veeam Solutions

Opti9 announced ransomware detection and standalone managed services for Veeam.

Danny Allan, Veeam CTO, provided an extensive and impressive press release quote - “Opti9 has leveraged Veeam’s feature-rich API in an innovative and unique way to address the very real security challenges being faced by IT organizations. Observr by Opti9 allows Veeam customers to further strengthen their security posture and ensure their backup and disaster recovery infrastructure is protected via the use of Observr’s AI-based anomaly detection. Additionally, the SLA-backed threat detection service, and its integrations with security platforms such as SIEMs and XDR software, provide increased assurances from a trusted Veeam partner."

Editor's note: Backups are probably one of the more consistent data operations. The rate of change and the volume of new data creation are good "knobs" to use when anticipating abnormal activity. Guess we'll see how long it takes for the bad actors to apply AI of their own to fly under the detection radar...

AWS Celebrates 17 Years of Simple Storage Service (S3) on Pi Day with a Plethora of Announcements

"On this day 17 years ago, we launched a very simple object storage service. It allowed developers to create, list, and delete private storage spaces (known as buckets), upload and download files, and manage their access permissions. The service was available only through a REST and SOAP API. It was designed to provide highly durable data storage with 99.999999999 percent data durability (that’s 11 nines!)." 

The announcements include:

• Mountpoint for Amazon S3 (alpha release): an open-source file client for Amazon S3

• Now Generally Available: AWS Data Exchange for Amazon S3

• Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points now support replicated datasets that span multiple AWS accounts

• Aliases for S3 Object Lambda Access Points as CloudFront origin

• Simplify private connectivity from on-premises networks

• Local Amazon S3 Replication on Outposts

• Amazon OpenSearch Security Analytics

TechTarget has its coverage and insights here. What's painfully obvious, especially with the new outpost feature, is that Amazon Web Services isn't just a cloud storage service provider raking in billions with egress and API fees; they're an on-prem storage solutions provider looking to eliminate everyone else's hardware as well.

Editor's Note - a little surprising that such a milestone at this could be relegated to a blog post and not merit the time and effort to issue a press release. Guess these new features either aren't all that new or all that exciting...

Think your passwords are secure? Think again! (hint - they're not as secure as you think they are...)

Depending on the number of characters and the mixture of numbers, symbols, and upper or lower case letters, your passwords can be cracked in as little as a minute to a few seconds. Now think about the number of company data breaches that involve password databases... Research from Hive Systems lays out the reality of the situation and explains how to mitigate the threat of password theft going forward.

Editor's Note - scarier than losing your password in a database breach is the sad reality that SO many folks use the SAME password for ALL their cloud services... 

Veeam Backup and Recovery v12 is coming! Veeam Backup and Recovery v12 is coming!

Our good friends at Veeam are about to release v12 of their flagship product - Veeam Backup and Recovery. There are a plethora of new features, including direct-to-object backups, which will potentially change the economics of data protection dramatically. To get a sneak peak of what's coming, check out this video with Rick Vanover and Kirsten Stoner from Veeam's Tech Bites series.

Besides cloud storage, we also keep an eye on the cybersecurity landscape. This alert from CISA is a little older, but a great reminder that data storage is a key target of bad actors looking for a ransom payout.

"Cyber actors routinely exploit poor security configurations (either misconfigured or left unsecured), weak controls, and other poor cyber hygiene practices to gain initial access or as part of other tactics to compromise a victim’s system. This joint Cybersecurity Advisory identifies commonly exploited controls and practices and includes best practices to mitigate the issues."

Editor's note - always good to see Multi-Factor Authentication called out as a mitigating factor; surprising NOT to see the use of immutable storage.

We're back! After a short hiatus we're back covering all the news that fit (or unfit) to share about cloud storage and related stories. Get ready to rumble and read!

Amazon Introduces S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval Storage Class - Monolithic hyperscaler AWS announced a new class of storage as part of their 2021 re:Invent elephant parade. The new tier promises to "deliver the lowest cost storage for long-lived data that is rarely accessed and requires millisecond retrieval", even with API and egress fees still a part of the billing fine print... 

Backblaze goes public, raises ~$100M - The "Good Guys" at Backblaze finally decided to test the IPO waters, looking for a little capital to expand their team while staying true to their "be kind" mantra. My best guess - it was time for Backblaze to grow up or go home. 14 years is a long time for a startup to hold investors' money, even if it was primarily friends and family. Announcements from partners like Cloudflare signal more intense competition going forward. Not surprising that Backblaze decided to put the pedal to the metal and charge ahead, given their good brand recognition in the consumer market for desktop backup. What is surprising is the relatively small amount of money raised, but then again, they pride themselves in being "capital efficient", so I'm sure they know what they're doing...

Backblaze goes public, raises ~$100M - The "Good Guys" at Backblaze finally decided to test the IPO waters, looking for a little capital to expand their team while staying true to their "be kind" mantra. My best guess - it was time for Backblaze to grow up or go home. 14 years is a long time for a startup to hold investors' money, even if it was primarily friends and family. Announcements from partners like Cloudflare signal more intense competition going forward. Not surprising that Backblaze decided to put the pedal to the metal and charge ahead, given their good brand recognition in the consumer market for desktop backup. What is surprising is the relatively small amount of money raised, but then again, they pride themselves in being "capital efficient", so I'm sure they know what they're doing...

Captain Obvious waxes poetic on big data best practices and counts up to six - Another insightful bit of clickbait from our market making friends at TechTarget. Are they really the best "best practices", or just the same old practices that stand head and shoulders above the rest? You decide... 

Wasabi announces support for S3 Object Lock - Object storage just got better for everyone not trapped in the AWS walled garden. Still cheaper too!

Wasabi Scores $112M Investment for "C" Round - TechCrunch delivered the news that Fidelity Management & Research led the round, with participation from existing investors. With a $700M valuation, Wasabi is clearly moving from the kid's table to the big table, making it the "Big 4" for cloud service providers.

Trois - Deux - Une- Kaboom! - Network World contributor W. Curtis Preston shares his perspective on the impact of the fire that destroyed OVHCloud's SBG2 data center in Strasbourg and why you should establish control of your own data backups.

The Alliance Grows Stronger - The Active Archive Alliance recently announced that StorMagic had joined the growing list of companies changing the business world. Sounds pretty lofty, but reassuring to know that someone besides Qumulo is looking out for the exabytes of data being generated every day.

Do you have an "F" to spare? - An insightful and somewhat hilariously sad essay by DR Griffin on the nature of cloud services pricing and discounts. Keep in mind that the Australian dollar (AUD or A$) is currently trading at an exchange rate of ~$0.78 when reading about the salary of a dedicated AWS Cost Manager (that's really a thing!).

5 Percent?!! - Back in March CRN posted an article "5 Big Things To Know About AWS’ New CEO Adam Selipsky". What stands out the most, IMHO, is this quote by Andy Jassy - “Less than 5 percent of the global IT spend is in the cloud at this point. That’s going to substantially change in the coming years." Sounds like there is plenty of room to grow for companies focused on cloud computing and data storage...

All About Ransomware - You're heard about it, probably because your local school/hospital/motor vehicle office has recently had their data held hostage for money. Check out the recent Andreessen Horowitz podcast to get oriented on what it's all about and what you can do to protect yourself.

31 Hybrid Cloud Storage Statistics That Can Affect Your Business - An informative article from G2 that will spruce up the next PowerPoint presentation you give with all kinds of great numbers and percentages. All sources are cited! I like "By 2022, more than 90% of enterprises will rely on a hybrid cloud environment to meet their infrastructure needs" because it is a big number and so close... so close.

SlashGear reports that "Google Cloud Storage Restrictions Extended for Docs and Friends" - It appears that Google has felt the rush to cloud in their data centers, particularly with their storage systems. Previously reported quota changes have been delayed to allow current customers more time to figure out what to do with all their unstructured data. I know one place they can go...

Aryaka's Fifth Annual Global State of the WAN Report Reveals Network Insights from 1,350 Global Enterprises - In their most recent press release and infographic, Aryaka identifies a number of key trends in their annual report, including the acceleration of network management and security, the rapid expansion of the hybrid work environment, and the growing need for application performance.

No news is good news, right? Happy Friday! Enjoy your weekend.

World Backup Day Extended by Three Weeks - IT Managers globally are panicked as LTO tape cassettes aboard the Evergreen cargo ship fail to arrive in time to complete their annual full backups. Perhaps there's a better solution...

eWeek Article "Why Cloud Native will Take Over the SaaS World" Hits the Nail on the Head Short article summary = elastic, innovative, resilient, and hopefully cost-effective spells success for SaaS vendors [and their customers].
The same thing applies to Storage as a Service vendors...

How to Store (Petabytes of) Machine Generated Data A clear and concise article by the good folks at Toshiba about why disk storage will be around for a VERY long time...

Samsung Cloud is Closing NOW - TechRadar.pro reports on the decommissioning of the Samsung Cloud storage service.
Looks like Leon is getting larger...

Jerome Wendt with DCIG shares his "Two Recommendations to Make Cloud Storage Simple Again"  - Jerome's article concisely explains what's wrong and how to fix it, from storing unstructured data on second-tier object storage to using a purpose-built cloud storage provider...

Qumulo Sees Unprecedented Increase in File Data Created by Global Media & Entertainment Customers  - In a press release from Qumulo the company asserts that their customers are saving money, increasing uptime, and rendering special effects faster than a speeding train. They even provide a prepackaged Tweet for you to share with your followers! Exciting PR is alive and well at Qumulo...

Verizon Enters Cloud Data Fray  - USA Today reports that Verizon is offering unlimited storage of photos, videos, and other files for $19.99 a month.
Any bets on the average capacity per user? Let's put the over/under at 100GB...

Disgruntled Contractor Trades "My Little Pony" T-Shirt for Prison Uniform After Deleting Office365 User Accounts - This is why we can't have nice things. THIS is why you HAVE TO backup O365. It's all right here.