Cloud tiering enables enterprises to offload unused cold data into cost-efficient cloud storage and should yield significant savings. Most enterprises today have a corporate cloud strategy and are now looking to move file workloads to the cloud. When done correctly, cloud tiering is an easy path to the cloud.

But not all cloud tiering and archiving solutions are the same. You may end up paying more in cloud egress and storage licensing costs by picking the wrong strategy.

This paper compares three alternatives to move file data to the cloud:

  1. Built-in storage cloud tiering (aka “pool” solutions)

  2. Cloud storage gateways

  3. File-level cloud tiering

A petabyte of file data can easily be a few billion files, each with their metadata, of varying sizes, and varying formats. The approach you take to cloud data tiering could either save you millions or cost you 75%+ higher cloud costs.