How Clumio delivered over $10M in cloud cost savings in 2023

And for good reason. Capita’s exposed bucket, incidents of SQL injection on AzureVM, and the global, 500-organization-wide cloud ransomware attack by Clop are just a few of the most infamous examples of adversarial attempts on cloud data in 2023.

As the center of gravity of critical data shifted to the cloud, customers also needed robust recovery strategies from production deletes, regional outages, and other inadvertent and unforeseeable data loss incidents. When customers have petabytes of data across multiple data services, there is bound to be some data loss, statistically speaking.

Furthermore, heightened regulatory scrutiny, especially in the financial and healthcare sectors, led to the need for more stringent long-term data retention for compliance. Million-dollar fines were handed out for failed audits, over-retention of data, as well as under-retention of data.

Customers of cloud service providers finally began to internalize the shared responsibility model: while providers are responsible for the durability of services and infrastructure, the customer’s data is their own responsibility. And not backing it up comes with steep consequences.

This 180° from “there’s no need to backup cloud data” to “we must backup everything” has predictably led to companies struggling with ineffective cloud backup strategies. The prevalent approach of perpetually accumulating snapshots and / or replicating them across regions and accounts has resulted in spiraling costs and reduced data visibility. Security, recoverability, and compliance are more challenging than ever with the unforeseen growth of secondary copies, which means companies now spend more on storage without gaining any operational efficiencies.

In 2023, we also saw some companies default to their on-prem backup and recovery vendors for their cloud backups, thereby importing their legacy architectures, performance drawbacks, and unfriendly licensing models into the cloud.

As cloud cost optimization continued to be a headline theme at AWS re:Invent 2023, many cloud-forward organizations approached Clumio to assist with overhauling their backup strategies. While most of these engagements started off as re-architectures or rebuilds, the outcome was most tangible on their AWS bills.  

Collectively, we saved our customers a whopping $10 million this year. 

Notably, we helped the world’s most popular genetic testing firm save over $400,000 by identifying and eliminating needless EBS snapshots. We also assisted a newly IPO’d financial lender slash over $300,000 from their annual cloud bill through RDS snapshot consolidation.

 

Numerous clients transitioned from resource-intensive filesystem-based backups to Clumio’s serverless, agentless backups, achieving significant cost reductions. And the world’s largest project management software company reported a 70% decrease in S3 backup costs, accounting for over a million dollars in savings.

Overall, Clumio’s interventions in streamlining database and volume snapshots, refining data protection policies, enabling more granular backups, and eradicating unnecessary copies culminated in over $10 million in total cloud cost savings for its customers.

Clumio’s approach to cost optimization in cloud backups revolves around several award-winning innovations. By enabling data classification prior to backups, Clumio helps customers select and safeguard only those datasets they deem most crucial across their data warehouses, data lakes, and other large-scale data repositories.

The platform also discovers cost hotspots across various data services, providing insights into the age and criticality of their backups. Regardless of where backups reside, Clumio helps identify cost hotspots and focus budgets on the most critical data. Clumio’s unique ability to identify and eliminate redundant snapshots and obsolete data further reduces AWS expenditures.

Additionally, Clumio offers fine-grained restoration options, down to the level of individual records, files, or objects. And multiple storage optimizations such as object tarballing and first-copy air gapping helps Clumio customers drive substantial and sustained cost efficiencies.

While your CIO is focusing on AI initiatives, you can become the cost champion for them by identifying and eliminating costs where no one’s looking: in your backups and snapshots. Clumio can help you save an average of 30% on backup costs by eliminating unnecessary snapshots, unused archives, and forgotten replicas, with larger storage environments seeing even more pronounced dollar savings. Customers that switch to Clumio start seeing immediate reduction in their backup bill with continuing improvement over time.

We look forward to helping you reduce your cloud costs in 2024.

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