The coronavirus pandemic is driving cloud storage transitions, generating great possibilities for channel partners that operate on almost every technology platform or industry.
Wasabi is an aptly identified and fairly recent cloud storage company. It's "on a mission to make cloud storage a simple commodity and utility, just like electricity", as per the brand's marketing blurb.
Instead of being a major rival to the likes of Dropbox, Google Drive, or indeed anything like Backblaze, Wasabi is targeting Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure face-on, and it's crucial to take that into account when you go through the services it provides and its costs. Read on to learn more.
How it Works
From the start, it's vital to know that you're purchasing cloud storage from Wasabi and that's about it. You're not having the user-friendly web interface and device synchronization apps you're getting with many of the other market offerings.
Wasabi does offer fast and cheap storage in the cloud, and what you do with it is up to you. You are asked to create a "Bucket" after you have made an account. A Bucket is a controlled space where data is stored.
You can create as many Buckets as you want, control access to them as necessary, and break off sections for multiple uses or with unique security configurations. You can add files and folders and have control access to them once you've created a Bucket.
Versioning and logging are enabled within your Buckets, but the Wasabi service's features are primarily dictated by the apps you choose to use (or create for yourself).
Why Is it Beneficial?
All that is included in the web app, from compliance tools to group and policy management options, is simple to locate and setup.
There's a remarkable degree of flexibility here when it comes to handling file access and maintaining many loads of data segregated from each other, even though web-based file browsing and editing capabilities are fairly much inexistent.
Security is another one of Wasabi's strengths, from two-factor authentication to data compliance management to user profile support and highly configurable access to files.
To a certain extent, the data security protections rely on the apps you are putting into Wasabi, however, end-to-end encryption is applicable if you want to reduce the chances of your data being read.
How Much it Costs
Certainly enough, the pricing bundles Wasabi has placed together would be enough to make you think. There's a pay-as-you-go method, providing cloud storage at $5.99 per TB for each month, which is really decent when you equate it to Wasabi's fierce competitors.
For data downloads or API requests, there are no additional charges, too, and if you want to reap the benefits of this, a 30-day trial period is available. If you sign up for the long term – for one, three, or five years – you will get a price discount on that.
Although, if you are willing to take that path, you have to buy at least 50 GB from Wasabi. Taking into account some of the pricey and complicated fee structures elsewhere in the cloud storage industry, it's nice to have anything as plain as that to switch to.
The Bottom Line
For what it is, you would like to see Wasabi as a provider of the basic commodity that is cloud storage, competing directly with Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3, and others. The price, flexibility, and ease of use are where Wasabi shines, although you won't find much in the way of user-facing features further than essential Bucket and user administration.
To finish the connectivity circle you are required to install extra applications and depend on Wasabi's help to do other services automatically provide. Once you have overcome those hurdles, this is a simple, safe, and fairly affordable option that appeals to many.
