London-based managed service provider (MSP) Autodata Products has opted for Scality Artesca object storage through its Scality cloud service provider (SCSP) pay-as-you-go purchasing option, which it uses to supply on-premise backup against ransomware for customers.
Benefits of the SCSP licensing model include being able to offer customers highly scalable backup with short recovery time objectives (RTOs) and at the same cost per terabyte (TB) whether it’s for 25TB or 2.5PB (petabytes).
Autodata Products provides IT solutions focused on backup, storage and security via its Cloudlake offer, predominantly based on Wasabi cloud, Veeam backup and Scality storage. It has around 500 customers on rolling monthly contracts and has offices in the US and the Netherlands.
Within its core offer it has Cloudlake Ransomware Recovery Vault (RRV), and it is here that it decided to offer services using Scality Artesca and SCSP. It was already a customer of Veeam’s pay-as-you-go programme.
RRV is based around the provision of on-site immutable storage for customers. Here, Autodata deploys Scality Artesca object storage as a backup target and pays only for what is used by its customers.
Scality launched version 2.0 of its Artesca platform in 2023, and built in a big emphasis on the ransomware protection inherent to object storage. Artesca is Scality’s object storage product aimed at single application use cases and is heavily targeted at data protection.
According to head of datacentre and cloud services Ant Bucknor, Autodata recommends customers keep a workable amount of critical data on-site so they can restore very quickly should a ransomware attack or other outage occur.
He said: “Our clients were restoring their data from the cloud. But that would often break their RTO policy because of the length of time it would take to get everything back up and running, then they would connect to the cloud location and then it would take them longer to bring the data back.”
So, how much data does Autodata recommend customers store on-site?
“I would suggest probably the last 30 days,” said Bucknor. “That would be my base guide, but obviously every client’s different. We’ve got clients where they have data they need to recover quickly from the last six months and others where if it’s over 48 hours old the data is completely worthless.
“The cloud will provide you with a full copy, and it will be immutable. But it isn’t necessarily going to be quick enough.”
Key to the benefits for Autodata are that it can supply ransomware recovery solutions that would have been out of reach of SME and mid-market customers previously, and that as it buys more product from Scality prices should decrease.
Bucknor said: “Traditionally, these solutions were in the hundreds of thousands of pounds. Whereas, because of the flexibility we have with Scality, we now have solutions that are suitable for SMB, mid-market, education, local government, etc, whereas these solutions just wouldn’t have been accessible to that market before.
“There’s a benefit from a profitability at scale point of view, as in the more of these we do over time, the bigger the benefit there is to Autodata as a business, with a knock-on effect in the better commercial terms for our customers.”
Pay-as-you-go is relatively new in storage purchasing, but it’s a rising trend. HPE offers pay-as-you-go storage as part of its Greenlake offer that stretches across its IT portfolio. NetApp, meanwhile, offers Keystone storage as-a-service, while Pure Storage has its Evergreen storage programmes.
“Pay-as-you-go is the future,” said Bucknor. “The reason is, people want to have a cloud-like purchasing model where they can buy what they want for as long as they want it, and when they don’t want it any more, they can stop paying for it. They want to know what their costs are. Not have bought something over five years and suddenly they want to buy an extra few terabytes of data and it’s three times the price because they’re locked in. People want a more flexible solution.”
