Video: 10 minute IT Jams - Another update from Wasabi Technologies

Cloud storage is everywhere. From backing up university research to storing CCTV footage, the need to securely and efficiently handle an ever-growing mountain of data has never been more pressing.

Enter Wasabi Technologies: a rapidly expanding player in the cloud storage space. While tech giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft dominate with their flagship platforms, Boston-headquartered Wasabi is carving out a niche by specialising solely in cloud object storage. Their approach, says Stephen Madden, Technical Alliance Manager for Australia and New Zealand, is simple: "to store all the world's data by making data storage simple, affordable, fast and secure."

Madden, who oversees distribution, channel partners and customer relationships across Australia and New Zealand, explained that Wasabi is "probably held right now with the 500 million plus dollars worth of investment [and] 400 people operating globally," supported by 13 data centres spanning several continents. Their self-described "hot cloud storage" is tailored to meet surging customer demand for blazing speed and ironclad security without breaking the bank.

"Cloud storage now is ubiquitous," Madden said. "Cloud services and applications - Amazon, Google, Azure, MSPs, ASPs - we see cloud everywhere." That ubiquity is tightly linked to a critical driver: the world's addiction to data backup and recovery. Madden estimates that the vast majority of data is actually secondary or even tertiary copies, simply existing as extra protection. "Analysts put that at 85 per cent or more," he added. "We definitely see a lot of that at Wasabi."

From educational institutions to film production houses, the hunger for storage only intensifies. "Files, NAS, primary workloads… video workflows, pre and post production, that's a lot of capacity and we see that demand at Wasabi most definitely," Madden said. He also noted the recent release of Wasabi Surveillance Cloud, allowing partners and customers to "securely store their CCTV video content in an off-site location which can be a key driver."

Australia is no exception to these trends. "Our Sydney location is going very strong. We have a lot of partners and customers ingesting [data] daily and doing that at scale," Madden added.

The company's strategy for growth revolves heavily around its partner network. Wasabi works with two primary kinds of partners: value-added resellers (VARs) and managed service providers (MSPs). For VARs, universities have proved to be particularly fertile ground. "One example of a vertical that we'd see them sell to their customers quite often is higher education - universities," said Madden. "That's really good business model for us and for our partners. Wasabi on the bill of materials for a service or a solution on that VAR model takes a lot of cost out, so it changes the whole product mix for the partner. It makes them very competitive."

Meanwhile, MSPs across the region are also getting on board. "Maybe 100 plus MSP partners across Australia and New Zealand right now," Madden said, fresh from a trip to Auckland where Wasabi is being implemented by local partners for reliable, cost-effective backup and recovery services.

He is quick to highlight how this benefits both the partner and the end customer. "The customer finds value, it's a high value profitable service for the partner, it's robust and it's reliable and the custom[er's] state is backed up in a secure facility," Madden explained.

What, then, sets Wasabi apart from the cloud hyperscalers? Madden believes it is their laser focus. "Wasabi's 100 per cent focused on cloud object storage and where - 13 data centres around the world," he explained. "We're focused on cloud object storage [and] by doing that, it's part of how we get to a very excellent price point for our partners and customers."

While the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft offer thousands of products in sprawling ecosystems, Wasabi's deliberate specialisation means "we're very efficient on the disk, it's our reference architecture, it's our stack, that's all we do." Yet even so, Wasabi does not see traditional hyperscalers as adversaries. "They have the compute, Lambda services, database services, networking, thousands of products and SKUs that we don't do," he said. "Our customers and partners will have compute services and database and the things that we don't do that would run in the hyperscaler cloud and there'll be a connection from that environment to Wasabi."

It's rarely a matter of choosing one or the other. "It's not one or the other, more often than not it is some of the hyperscaler and using that in conjunction with Wasabi," Madden clarified.

Wasabi also offers some specialised applications, including the Account Control Manager - a free tool allowing partners and customers to quickly provision storage accounts internally, a benefit especially embraced by universities. Beyond that, there is Wasabi Cloud NAS, which helps offload Windows file server capacity to the cloud seamlessly, a solution increasingly popular in healthcare, engineering, construction and small office environments.

Surveillance and private network connectivity are also on the menu. "There's Wasabi Surveillance Cloud… and also there's networking capability inside the service so we can have a physical port on our ends so our customers can connect to us over private links," Madden pointed out.

Joining the Wasabi partner ecosystem is intentionally straightforward, with extensive onboarding resources provided. "We try to make that really easy. We do make that easy for our partners to onboard with us," Madden said. "There's then the partner portal for deal registration, all the sales and marketing collateral, training and things like that, so it's a rich set of resources out there for our partners to access."

Wasabi's ambitions are global but its pitch is simple: dependable, affordable, easy-to-deploy cloud storage, delivered with the help of a thriving partner network. Summing up, Madden said, "Customers are very happy so they're derived by customer satisfaction and be able to do that in a way that's very competitive in the market where cloud is ubiquitous."