How Much Does a Petabyte Cost

Recently, my colleagues and I were looking for USB sticks to use during a conference. That’s when we all seemed to realize we don’t use those anymore. No more funny, slow flash drives; CD-roms that were taking up space; or USB-sticks that were always getting lost. Today, we store all our data on servers, whether that be on-site servers or cloud-based servers. They’re easier to use and much securer, but they tend to not be cheap. However, it’s not all bad news. There has been a significant growth in data storage across enterprises and organizations are shifting data to the cloud more and more. Even though this migration is still ongoing, we already see the cost-efficiency of cloud storage.

Did you know that in 2021, across organizations, all of us combined were storing 7.9 zettabytes (ZB)?! That’s a trillion Gigabytes, or 2.600 billion hours of streaming Netflix. That’s a tough one to wrap your head around, right. To make it slightly easier on our brains, Wasabi’s Andrew Smith used 1Petabyte (PB, and believe me, that’s not peanuts) to offer an overview of pricing. You can read all the details on their blog, but we’ll give you the gist:

• 1PB stored on premise for 5 years: $1,310,000
• 1PB stored in a public cloud for 5 years: $1,787,443
• 1PB stored with Wasabi’s storage solution for 5 years: $367,980

Andrew Smith ends his article with the concluding thought: “organizations should budget more than $1 million to store 1PB of data over five years.” However, It’s clear that choosing the right cloud provider can help you stay within your organization’s available budget.

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