Feature: Rethinking storage economics

In this Q&A, Eric Leblanc, Vice President of Worldwide Channel Sales and General Manager of Artesca at Scality, makes the argument for PAYG models.

What are the most significant limitations of fixed storage plans for service providers?

Hidden costs and murky economics often complicate fixed-price storage plans. Vendor obfuscation can make storage unit costs appear more favourable than they are, obscuring the true pricing picture with terminology that creates confusion.

Capacity unit pricing also hides key elements and solution differences in operating costs (such as power, cooling, data centre floor space, etc.) and management costs, so it is by no means comprehensive. Inflexible, overprovisioned infrastructure doesn’t fit the business model of on-demand services.

Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) consumption-based pricing involves transitioning to an OpEx-based pricing model, which is more manageable for many customers.

A PAYG licensing model, with flexible terms that typically include 1-, 2-, 3-, or 5-year commitments, helps SCSPs maintain streamlined operations. Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is boosted, while dynamic monthly billing means only paying for utilised storage capacity, allowing costs and revenue to be aligned.

Storage is foundational to modern data workloads, and a new generation of business applications, in areas such as AI, big data, and multi-cloud architectures, are bringing forth major changes in data consumption. Inflexible and inflated storage costs can be a barrier to developing projects, sinking them before their benefits can be fully realised.

With PAYG storage, this burden is far easier to manage, benefiting projects of all sizes by avoiding the pitfall of spiralling infrastructure payments that can sink great ideas.

Additionally, with ransomware threats affecting organisations worldwide, security is now a major concern, which is why CORE5 cyber resiliency is a critical part of Scality’s platform.

How does the PAYG model help MSPs optimise costs?

Managed service providers were among the first to embrace true pay-as-you-go models — for competitive reasons, they had no choice. Today, every hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle) offers consumption-based storage. Similarly, most MSPs delivering backup-as-a-service or infrastructure-as-a-service to SMBs do so.

But there’s a critical nuance: while capacity might be priced predictably, workloads drive real costs. Data access, transaction volume, security, and service-level SLA guarantees all add complexity and differentiation.

A key benefit to MSPs is that PAYG licensing opens up high-end, robust, and ransomware-proof technology that was previously out of reach for SME customers, making it affordable for new markets to adopt. That includes education, local government and mid-market. As these new installs scale up, MSP margins will increase, and thereby revenue can grow as well.

With PAYG licensing, you are charged based on actual usage, without an upfront commitment and the flexibility to scale up or down based on demand. Conversely, traditional subscription-based storage pricing is a fixed fee for a set amount of storage.

The murky economics and language are replaced with clear pricing so customers know exactly what they are getting.

However, that still carries over some of the old problems of legacy storage use, though. You may end up overpaying for unused capacity or require over-provisioning whenever demand increases.

How does the CORE5 cyber-resiliency framework enhance security?

Ransomware is now the most significant global cyberthreat, with sophisticated attacks that can cripple a business. The recommended response is to adopt a security strategy known as cyber resilience, which involves relying on immutable backups that prevent the modification, encryption, or deletion of data.

However, this approach has flaws that may still leave data vulnerable to cyberattacks.

To start, many immutable backups are not necessarily immutable at all times, so an attacker still has a window of opportunity to modify the data. It also doesn’t tackle exfiltration attacks, where attackers steal data and threaten to sell it, but do not modify the originals, meaning immutability is powerless to prevent them. And lastly, with AI-driven attacks, the volume and precision of threats are set to take off, making them much harder to prevent.

Scality’s solution is CORE5, a new standard of cyber-resilient storage where data is always protected, with security that goes beyond immutability alone, with end-to-end cyber resilience.

Data is protected at all levels. At the API level, it means full S3 Object Lock compatibility. At the data level, it’s protected with a zero-trust architecture, 256-bit AES encryption and secure S3 endpoint termination. At the storage level, distributed erasure coding technology makes data unreadable to exfiltration attackers. At the geographic level, it supports geographic redundancy from the ground up, ensuring data can be administered across multiple sites.

At the architectural level, attacks are mitigated if they might exploit inherent vulnerabilities in traditional file systems, such as the ability of a super admin account to remove immutability from stored data. CORE5 achieves this through a native object storage architecture that handles data in a manner that ensures it remains immutable, even to users with super admin privileges.

Given the differences in application vendor storage workloads and sizings, there are no real industry-standard benchmarks. However, Scality does provide backup and restore performance with Veeam Backup and Replication (VBR) with specific Artesca configurations. Prospective customers can contact Scality with their requirements and receive a sizing quote, along with the associated performance data.

How does Artesca’s pricing model align with Veeam’s PAYG licensing framework?

Artesca’s PAYG licensing is modelled directly on Veeam’s own PAYG model, providing an extremely familiar framework for customers already familiar with Veeam. As AI pricing models become more standardised, we anticipate the PAYG model adapting to these newer application requirements.

Autodata is a certified Platinum Veeam Cloud & Service Provider partner, and one of the first to have benefited from Scality’s Cloud & Service Provider programme. Autodata has offered valuable feedback on the programme:

Artesca offers unlimited scale, unmatched performance, and unbreakable cyber resilience. The flexible pricing model sealed the deal – we only pay for the capacity our customers need. Scality’s software-only solution also helped us maintain strong discounts with our preferred hardware vendor, and its easy deployment with Supermicro servers made implementation seamless. We immediately saw a 50% saving compared to other solutions.”