


Doing the Mathįirst, we will examine what a relatively large amount of cold data archives would cost if stored long term in the cloud.Ĭhecking long-term storage pricing from several major Cloud Service Providers (CSP) we find that the lowest price is $.007 per GB per month for archive class storage. There is a reason that many organizations are now starting to question their decision to store large quantities of cold and archive data in the cloud long term. While we have previously examined a few weaknesses of cloud storage such as latency and bandwidth issues, we have not really examined the actual costs of cloud storage in any detail to see the potential costs of storing large quantities of cold data and archive data long term in the cloud, or retrieving any of that archived data until now. As my colleague, George Crump, discussed in a previous article, “ What is Better than Cloud Storage for Cold Data”, cloud storage is great for processing active data but becomes increasingly expensive for storing cold data that is seldom accessed.
