Storage is one of the most essential yet cost-sensitive parts of every company's digital environment. Accessing current business data, creating backups and application images for business continuity, and storing cold data for later mining or legislative requirements - there are many reasons why storage is crucial.

These use cases also make storage more complicated. We generate much more data than ever before - even though storage is cheaper, we need more of it. It is prudent to select the most suitable storage for the right data at the best time.

A flexible and responsive storage strategy can deliver immediate benefits. It can reduce costs, simplify data management, and increase application performance.

Storage-as-a-Service gives companies more choice and agility around how and when they store data. Regardless of company size (Public Sector, SME, Large Enterprises, etc.) or sector (Mining, Retail, Agriculture, Healthcare, Transportation, Energy Generation, etc.), every organisation can benefit from Storage-as-a-Service.

Vodacom Business, in collaboration with AWS, works closely with our customers to align the following storage outcomes:

• Data management strategies, including the growth of data and long term retention.
• Types of data such as sensitive personal data, sensitive company data and publicly accessible data.
• Data availability requirements suited to employees, supply chain partners, B2B partners, customers, and legislative authorities.

To ensure our storage solutions remain agile and flexible, Vodacom Business relies on AWS S3 (AWS Simple Storage Services). We create a strategy configured to use one or more AWS S3 storage tiers, ensuring the correct data is always in the right place for the necessary exposure and costs. AWS Storage-as-a-Service offers customers the following product options:

For frequently-accessed data

The AWS S3 Standard Tier is best suited for frequently-accessed data, providing high durability, availability and performance object storage with low latency and high throughput. This tier is very suitable for various use cases, including cloud applications, dynamic websites, big data analytics and content distribution. 

For frequent/infrequent data access

Some storage workloads are dynamic, switching between frequent and infrequent access. Managing such data workloads could incur unexpected costs if they are not managed accordingly. AWS S3 Intelligent Tiering automatically moves data to the most appropriate storage tier without causing performance impact. It's the perfect solution for long-lived data with unknown or unpredictable access patterns. AWS S3 Intelligent Tiering monitors access patterns for a small monthly monitoring and automation per-object fee, moving infrequently-accessed data after 30 days to different tiers without charging retrieval or additional tiering costs.

For infrequent but rapid-access

Certain data types might sit dormant yet require rapid access, such as backups or disaster recovery files. AWS offers both S3 Standard-IA and S3 One Zone-I to provide low-cost and high-performance storage with a low per-GB storage price and retrieval fee. AWS S3 Standard-IA operates across three availability zones, ensuring the best retrieval performance. For use cases that don't need such high response times, AWS S3 One Zone-IA operates with one availability zone at around 20% less cost.

These storage choices are not only affordable - they deliver real value through their flexibility. AWS S3 Storage Classes can be configured at the object level, and a single bucket can contain objects stored across the different options. AWS S3 Lifecycle policies can automatically transition objects between storage classes without any application changes.

Vodacom Business is the best partner to help you craft a flexible and cost-effective storage strategy, utilising AWS' Storage-as-a-Service options. We have over 330 AWS-certified staff members, and we leverage Vodacom's network and infrastructure leadership to support your cloud strategy in a simple, smarter and more secure way.

Additionally, we are an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, AWS Direct Connect Service Delivery Partner, AWS Outposts Ready Consulting Partner, and AWS Well-Architected Partner - providing storage choices across Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), AWS Backup, AWS Storage Gateway, and AWS Snowball.

One type of storage solution doesn't fit all your data needs. We collaborate to assess your business storage needs, create migration plans, and establish a versatile automated management environment. Contact Vodacom Business today and learn how we, along with AWS, can turn your storage from a headache into a value creator.

Find out more

Our range of SMART solutions helps you focus on your small business and taking care of employees, while we focus on the technology to help you grow. For more info on our various AWS offerings please email AWSLeads2@vodacom.co.za