In the last few years, cloud storage has become so inexpensive that most teams barely think about it. Services like S3 can store petabytes for pennies, and Glacier can archive data for less than the price of a coffee each month. We know how easy it is to spin up buckets and push data in, and it’s no wonder storage often gets treated as an afterthought.
But here’s the catch: cheap doesn’t mean unimportant. With the rise of digital transformation, every company is turning into a data company, with its data volumes skyrocketing. For example, e-commerce sites track every click by customers, manufacturers stream IoT sensor feeds, storing every log, and banks store every transaction for years for audit and compliance reasons.