Cloud storage can offer a number of benefits by reducing hardware investments, electricity to power and cool them, management expenses and warranty services to maintain them.

However, as Jon Brown, Senior Analyst at Omdia (formerly Enterprise Strategy Group) notes in his Showcase article, “cloud data storage also comes with a number of “gotchas”—most notably, surprisingly high egress fees that organizations often overlook when deploying a workload or storing data in the cloud.” Brown adds, “Cloud providers charge monthly storage fees for API calls, for data access, and to get proprietary data back, especially when an organization needs it in a hurry.”

He explains that when you need to move large amounts of data from the cloud to repatriate or restore after a cyber-attack or other event, the costs to egress the information can be alarming.

CLOUD EGRESS CAN SNEAK UP ON YOU

The process to move data from a cloud provider to another location is called egress and happens more frequently than one may anticipate. Brown explains that, “Egress fees are charges that are incurred when data leaves a cloud provider’s infrastructure. While cloud providers typically offer free or nearly free data ingress (data entering their environment), they typically impose significant charges when that same data exits their ecosystem.” According to Enterprise Strategy Group recent research, “60% of surveyed organizations reported experiencing unplanned data repatriation [egress] within the past 24 months. This highlights a significant disconnect between expectations and reality in cloud storage economics.”

What are the costs to egress data?
In an example highlighted in the Showcase article, “… based on the LTO TCO Calculator, a company with 1 PB of data in storage and a 10% annual growth in that storage accesses 5% of that data monthly.

The company can incur cloud costs of just over $1,000,000 for the storage and access to that data over a nine-year lifecycle.

If that data were stored on LTO Ultrium, the total lifecycle cost of ownership for that data would drop by over 91% to $96,007.96, saving the company $109,781.82 in cloud costs annually and $988,036.38 over that same projected nine-year lifetime.” Another example is highlighted in the Showcase article and begs the question from Brown, “Why would anyone store infrequently accessed data in the cloud knowing that the costs for using that data are astronomical?”

LET THE SUNSHINE IN

LTO tape storage can be a strategic asset in your plan to mitigate high storage costs including the curtailment of cloud egress fees. As outlined in the Showcase article, the use of on-site LTO storage systems can provide a number of sunny benefits that include:

• Lower TCO: especially for long-term data retention where cloud costs compound annually.
• One-time purchase: Unlike cloud’s recurring subscription model, tape infrastructure requires only an initial capital investment, with no ongoing storage fees.
• No egress fees: Organizations avoid the substantial data retrieval costs that cloud providers charge when accessing or moving large volumes of stored data.
• Predictable costs: Tape storage offers fixed, calculable expenses that enable accurate budget forecasting without surprise charges or variable pricing models.
• True air gap protection: Physical tape media can be completely disconnected from networks, providing genuine isolation that cloud storage cannot match for ultimate cybersecurity protection.