Wasabi, the cloud storage gem

Wasabi Technologies, the active player in cloud storage who shakes the top 3 public cloud providers for secondary storage needs, joined The IT Press Tour this week in Boston. It was the perfect time to get an update about the company and its offering and the directions they'll take soon.

We had the privilege to be with David Friend, CEO and co-founder, to present and discuss with us. The company, founded in 2015, has raised more then $500 million and is of course included in the Storage Unicorn Club published bi-annually by Coldago Research for several years.

With more 100,000 customers attached to 14 storage regions and 15,000+ partners of all kind, several exabyte are stored with for example more of 1EB of Veeam pushed data. Wasabi is used by various industries with a real partnership effort pushing a channel first approach. All storage sites are co-located with local internet, data centers and cloud service providers.

The Wasabi offering is pretty simple in its concept with of course a real complexity in its deployment but it is completely masked to users and consumers. The idea was to leverage S3 API as the de-facto standard for universal data access to cost effective cloud storage. In other words, build a 100% compatible solution with AWS S3 storage that invites users to select or switch in favor of Wasabi at an attractive cost, 805 less than Amazon. Of course users continue to own their data in a very secure way and can predict cost. With AWS S3 and other similar services, traffic costs increase the final bill and it is very difficult to anticipate the real final cost. With Wasabi this traffic is reduced to zero so users pay only for capacity per month.

Performance is also pretty good and data is immutable, protected by erasure coding in each site and replicated across regions projected 11 9's of durability. Encryption is done in-flight and at-rest with strong identity and access management (IAM), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and multi-user authorization (MUA).