Memory is a finite resource when it comes to both humans and computers—it’s one of the most common causes of computer issues. And if you’ve ever left the house without your keys, you know memory is one of the most common human problems, too.

If you’re unclear about the different types of memory in your computer, it makes pinpointing the cause of computer problems that much harder. You might hear folks use the terms memory and storage interchangeably, but there are some important differences. Understanding how both components work can help you understand what kind of computer you need, diagnose problems you’re having, and know when it’s time to consider upgrades. 

The Difference Between RAM and Storage

Random access memory (RAM) and storage are both forms of computer memory, but they serve different functions. 

What Is RAM?

RAM is volatile memory used by the computer’s processor to store and quickly access data that is actively being used or processed. Volatile memory maintains data only while the device is powered on. RAM takes the form of computer chips—integrated circuits—that are either soldered directly onto the main logic board of your computer or installed in memory modules that go in sockets on your computer’s logic board.

You can think of it like a desk—it’s where your computer gets work done. When you double-click on an app, open a document, or do much of anything, part of your “desk” is covered and can’t be used by anything else. As you open more files, it is like covering your desk with more and more items. Using a desk with a handful of files is easy, but a desk that is covered with a bunch of stuff gets difficult to use.

What Is Computer Storage?

On the other hand, storage is used for long-term data retention, like a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD). Compared with RAM, this type of storage is non-volatile, which means it retains information even when a device is powered off. You can think of storage like a filing cabinet—a place next to your desk where you can retrieve information as needed. 

RAM vs. Storage: How Do They Compare?

Speed and Performance

Two of the primary differences between RAM and storage are speed and performance. RAM is significantly faster than storage. Data stored in RAM can be written and accessed almost instantly, so it’s very fast—milliseconds fast. DDR4 RAM, one of the newer types of RAM technology, is capable of a peak transfer rate of 25.6GB/s! RAM has a very fast path to the computer’s central processing unit (CPU), the brain of the computer that does most of the work. 

Storage, as it’s slower in comparison, is responsible for holding the operating system (OS), applications, and user data for the long term—it should still be fast, but it doesn’t need to be as fast as RAM.

That said, computer storage is getting faster thanks to the popularity of SSDs. SSDs are much faster than hard drives since they use integrated circuits instead of mechanical platters that have to be read sequentially, like HDDs. SSDs use a special type of memory circuitry called non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) to store data, so those shorter term memory access points stay in place even when the computer is turned off.

Even though SSDs are faster than HDDs, they’re still slower than RAM. There are two reasons for that difference in speed. First, the memory chips in SSDs are slower than those in RAM. Second, there is a bottleneck created by the interface that connects the storage device to the computer. RAM, in comparison, has a much faster interface.

Capacity and Size

RAM is typically smaller in capacity compared to storage. It is measured in gigabytes (GB) or terabytes (TB), whereas storage capacities can reach multiple terabytes or even petabytes. The smaller size of RAM is intentional, as it is designed to store only the data currently in use, ensuring quick access for the processor.

Volatility and Persistence

Another key difference is the volatility of RAM and the persistence of storage. RAM is volatile, meaning it loses its data when the power is turned off or the system is rebooted. This makes it ideal for quick data access and manipulation, but unsuitable for long-term storage. Storage is non-volatile or persistent, meaning it retains data even when the power is off, making it suitable for holding files, applications, and the operating system over extended periods.

How Much RAM Do I Have?

Understanding how much RAM you have might be one of your first steps for diagnosing computer performance issues. 

Use the following steps to confirm how much RAM your computer has installed. We’ll start with an Apple computer. Click on the Apple menu and then click About This Mac. In the screenshot below, we can see that the computer has 16GB of RAM.

With a Windows 11 computer, use the following steps to see how much RAM you have installed. Open the Control Panel by clicking the Windows button and typing “control panel,” then click System and Security, and then click System. Look for the line “Installed RAM.” In the screenshot below, you can see that the computer has 32GB of RAM installed.

How Much Computer Storage Do I Have?

To view how much free storage space you have available on a Mac computer, use these steps. Click on the Apple menu, then System Settings, select General, and then open Storage. In the screenshot below, we’ve circled where your available storage is displayed.

With a Windows 11 computer, it is also easy to view how much available storage space you have. Click the Windows button and type in “file explorer.” When File Explorer opens, click on This PC from the list of options in the left-hand pane. In the screenshot below, we’ve circled where your available storage is displayed (in this case, 200GB).

How RAM and Storage Affect Your Computer’s Performance

RAM

For most general-purpose uses of computers—email, writing documents, surfing the web, or watching Netflix—the RAM that comes with our computer is enough. If you own your computer for a long enough time, you might need to add a bit more to keep up with memory demands from newer apps and OSes. Specifically, more RAM makes it possible for you to use more apps, documents, and larger files at the same time.

People that work with very large files like large databases, videos, and images can benefit significantly from having more RAM. If you regularly use large files, it is worth checking to see if your computer’s RAM is upgradeable.

Adding More RAM to Your Computer

In some situations, adding more RAM is worth the expense. For example, editing videos and high-resolution images takes a lot of memory. In addition, high-end audio recording and editing as well as some scientific work require significant RAM.

However, not all computers allow you to upgrade RAM. For example, the Chromebook typically has a fixed amount of RAM, and you cannot install more. So, when you’re buying a new computer—particularly if you plan on using that computer for more than five years, make sure to 1) understand how much RAM your computer has, and, 2) if you can upgrade the computer’s RAM. 

When your computer’s RAM is filled up, your computer has to get creative to keep working. Specifically, your computer starts to temporarily use your hard drive or SSD as “virtual memory.” If you have relatively fast storage like an SSD, virtual memory will be fast. On the other hand, using a traditional hard drive will be fairly slow.

Storage

Besides RAM, the most serious bottleneck to improving performance in your computer can be your storage. Even with plenty of RAM installed, computers need to read and write information from the storage system (i.e., the HDD or the SSD).

Hard drives come in different speeds and sizes. For laptops and desktops, the most common RPM rates are between 5400–7200RPM. In some cases, you might even decide to use a 10,000RPM drive. Faster drives cost more, are louder, have greater cooling needs, and use more power, but they may be a good option.

New disk technologies enable hard drives to be bigger and faster. These technologies include filling the drive with helium instead of air to reduce disk platter friction and using heat or microwaves to improve disk density, such as with heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) drives and microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) drives.

Today, SSDs are becoming increasingly popular for computer storage. This type of computer storage is popular because it is faster, cooler, and takes up less space than traditional hard drives. They’re also less susceptible to magnetic fields and physical jolts, which makes them great for laptops. 

For more about the difference between HDDs and SSDs, check out our post, “Hard Disk Drive (HDD) vs. Solid-state Drive (SSD): What’s the Diff?”

Adding More Computer Storage

As a user’s disk storage needs increase, typically they will look to larger drives to store more data. The first step might be to replace an existing drive with a larger, faster drive. Or you might decide to install a second drive. One approach is to use different drives for different purposes. For example, use an SSD for the operating system, and then store your business videos on a larger SSD.

If more storage space is needed, you can also use an external drive, most often using USB or Thunderbolt to connect to the computer. This can be a single drive or multiple drives and might use a data storage virtualization technology such as RAID to protect the data.

If you have really large amounts of data, or simply wish to make it easy to share data with others in your location or elsewhere, you might consider network-attached storage (NAS). A NAS device can hold multiple drives, typically uses a data virtualization technology like RAID, and is accessible to anyone on your local network and—if you wish—on the internet, as well. NAS devices can offer a great deal of storage and other services that typically have been offered only by dedicated network servers in the past.

Back Up Early and Often

As a cloud storage company, we’d be remiss not to mention that you should back up your computer. No matter how you configure your computer’s storage, remember that technology can fail (we know a thing or two about that). You always want a backup so you can restore everything easily. The best backup strategy shouldn’t be dependent on any single device, either. Your backup strategy should always include three copies of your data on two different mediums with one off-site.

FAQs About Differences Between RAM and Storage

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Programs, processes, and threads are all terms that relate to software execution, but you may not know what they really mean. Whether you’re a seasoned developer, an aspiring enthusiast, or you’re just wondering what you’re looking at when you open Task Manager on a PC or Activity Monitor on a Mac, learning these terms is essential for understanding how a computer works.

This post explains the technical concepts behind computer programs, processes, and threads to give you a better understanding of the functionality of your digital devices. With this knowledge, you can quickly diagnose problems and come up with solutions, like knowing if you need to install more memory for better performance. If you care about having a fast, efficient computer, it is worth taking the time to understand these key terms. 

What Is a Computer Program?

A program is a sequence of coded commands that tells a computer to perform a given task. There are many types of programs, including programs built into the operating system (OS) and ones to complete specific tasks. Generally, task-specific programs are called applications (or apps). For example, you are probably reading this post using a web browser application like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Apple Safari. Other common applications include email clients, word processors, and games.

The process of creating a computer program involves designing algorithms, writing code in a programming language, and then compiling or interpreting that code to transform it into machine-readable instructions that the computer can execute.

Compiled vs. Interpreted Programs

Many programs are written in a compiled language and created using programming languages like C, C++, C#. The end result is a text file of code that is compiled into binary form in order to run on the computer (more on binary form in a few paragraphs). The text file speaks directly to your computer. While they’re typically fast, they are also fixed compared to interpreted programs. That has positives and negatives: you have more control over things like memory management, but you’re platform dependent and, if you have to change something in your code, it typically takes longer to build and test.

There is another kind of program called an interpreted program. They require an additional program to take your program instructions and translate that to code for your computer. Compared with compiled languages, these types of programs are platform-independent (you just have to find a different interpreter, instead of writing a whole new program) and they typically take up less space. Some of the most common interpreted programming languages are Python, PHP, JavaScript, and Ruby.

Ultimately, both kinds of programs are run and loaded into memory in binary form. Programs have to run in binary because your computer’s CPU understands only binary instructions.

What Is Binary Code?

Binary is the native language of computers. At their most basic level, computers use only two states of electrical current—on and off. The on state is represented by 1 and the off state is represented by 0. Binary is different from the number system—base 10—that we use in daily life. In base 10, each digit position can be anything from 0 to 9. In the binary system, also known as base 2, each position is either a 0 or a 1.

How Are Computer Programs Stored and Run?

Programs are typically stored on a disk or in nonvolatile memory in executable format. Let’s break that down to understand why.

In this context, we’ll talk about your computer having two types of memory: volatile and nonvolatile. Volatile memory is temporary and processes in real time. It’s faster, easily accessible, and increases the efficiency of your computer. However, it’s not permanent. When your computer turns off, this type of memory resets.

Nonvolatile memory, on the other hand, is permanent unless deleted. While it’s slower to access, it can store more information. So, that makes it a better place to store programs. A file in an executable format is simply one that runs a program. It can be run directly by your CPU (that’s your processor). Examples of these file types are .exe in Windows and .app in Mac.

What Resources Does a Program Need to Run?

Once a program has been loaded into memory in binary form, what happens next?

Your executing program needs resources from the OS and memory to run. Without these resources, you can’t use the program. Fortunately, your OS manages the work of allocating resources to your programs automatically. Whether you use Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, or something else, your OS is always hard at work directing your computer’s resources needed to turn your program into a running process.

In addition to OS and memory resources, there are a few essential resources that every program needs.

• Register. Think of a register as a holding pen that contains data that may be needed by a process like instructions, storage addresses, or other data.
• Program counter. Also known as an instruction pointer, the program counter plays an organizational role. It keeps track of where a computer is in its program sequence.
• Stack. A stack is a data structure that stores information about the active subroutines of a computer program. It is used as scratch space for the process. It is distinguished from dynamically allocated memory for the process that is known as the “heap.”

What Is a Computer Process?

When a program is loaded into memory along with all the resources it needs to operate, it is called a process. You might have multiple instances of a single program. In that situation, each instance of that running program is a process. 

Each process has a separate memory address space. That separate memory address is helpful because it means that a process runs independently and is isolated from other processes. However, processes cannot directly access shared data in other processes. Switching from one process to another requires some amount of time (relatively speaking) for saving and loading registers, memory maps, and other resources.

Having independent processes matters for users because it means one process won’t corrupt or wreak havoc on other processes. If a single process has a problem, you can close that program and keep using your computer. Practically, that means you can end a malfunctioning program and keep working with minimal disruptions.

What Are Threads?

The final piece of the puzzle is threads. A thread is the unit of execution within a process.

When a process starts, it receives an assignment of memory and other computing resources. Each thread in the process shares that memory and resources. With single-threaded processes, the process contains one thread.

In multi-threaded processes, the process contains more than one thread, and the process is accomplishing a number of things at the same time (to be more accurate, we should say “virtually” the same time—you can read more about that in the section below on concurrency).

Earlier, we talked about the stack and the heap, the two kinds of memory available to a thread or process. Distinguishing between these kinds of memory matters because each thread will have its own stack. However, all the threads in a process will share the heap.

Some people call threads lightweight processes because they have their own stack but can access shared data. Since threads share the same address space as the process and other threads within the process, it is easy to communicate between the threads. The disadvantage is that one malfunctioning thread in a process can impact the viability of the process itself.

How Threads and Processes Work Step By Step

Here’s what happens when you open an application on your computer.

• The program starts out as a text file of programming code.
• The program is compiled or interpreted into binary form.
• The program is loaded into memory.
• The program becomes one or more running processes. Processes are typically independent of one another.
• Threads exist as the subset of a process.
• Threads can communicate with each other more easily than processes can.
• Threads are more vulnerable to problems caused by other threads in the same process.

Computer Process vs. Threads

What About Concurrency and Parallelism?

A question you might ask is whether processes or threads can run at the same time. The answer is: it depends. In environments with multiple processors or CPU cores, simultaneous execution of multiple processes or threads is feasible. However, on a single processor system, true simultaneous execution isn’t possible. In these cases, a process scheduling algorithm is employed to share the CPU among running processes or threads, creating the illusion of parallel execution. Each task is allocated a “time slice,” and the swift switching between tasks occurs seamlessly, typically imperceptible to users. The terms “parallelism” (denoting genuine simultaneous execution) and “concurrency” (indicating the interleaving of processes over time to simulate simultaneous execution) distinguish between the two modes of operation, whether truly simultaneous or approximated.

How Google Chrome Uses Processes and Threads

To illustrate the impact of processes and threads, let’s consider a real-world example with a program that many of us use, Google Chrome. 

When Google designed the Chrome browser, they faced several important decisions. For instance, how should Chrome handle the fact that many different tasks often happen at the same time when using a browser? Every browser window (or tab) may communicate with several servers on the internet to download audio, video, text, and other resources. In addition, many users have 10 to 20 browser tabs (or more…) open most of the time, and each of these tabs may perform multiple tasks.

Google had to decide how to handle all of these tasks. They chose to run each browser window in Chrome as a separate process rather than a thread or many threads. That approach brought several benefits.

• Running each window as a process protects the overall application from bugs and glitches.
• Isolating a JavaScript program in a process prevents it from using too much CPU time and memory and making the entire browser unresponsive.

That said, there is a trade-off cost to Google’s design decision. Starting a new process for each browser window has a higher fixed cost in memory and resources compared to using threads. They were betting that their approach would end up with less memory bloat overall.

Using processes instead of threads provides better memory usage when memory is low. In practice, an inactive browser window is treated as a lower priority. That means the operating system may swap it to disk when memory is needed for other processes. If the windows were threaded, it would be more difficult to allocate memory efficiently which ultimately leads to lost computer performance.

For more insights on Google’s design decisions for Chrome on Google’s Chromium Blog or on the Chrome Introduction Comic.

The screen capture below shows the Google Chrome processes running on a MacBook Air with many tabs open. You can see that some Chrome processes are using a fair amount of CPU time and resources (e.g., the one at the top is using 44 threads) while others are using fewer.

The Activity Monitor on the Mac (or Task Manager in Windows) on your system can be a valuable ally in fine-tuning your computer or troubleshooting problems. If your computer is running slowly or a program or browser window isn’t responding for a while, you can check its status using the system monitor.

In some cases, you’ll see a process marked as “Not Responding.” Try quitting that process and see if your system runs better. If an application is a memory hog, you might consider choosing a different application that will accomplish the same task.

Made It This Far?

We hope this Tron-like dive into the fascinating world of computer programs, processes, and threads has cleared up some questions.

At the start, we promised clarity on using these terms to improve performance. You can use Activity Monitor on the Mac or Task Manager on Windows to close applications and processes that are malfunctioning. That’s beneficial because it means you can end a malfunctioning program without the hassle of turning off your computer.

Still have questions? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

FAQ

The post What’s the Diff: Programs, Processes, and Threads appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Everyone has their arsenal of indispensable gadgets and apps they absolutely couldn’t live without, and we had a feeling the folks here at Backblaze would have a lot to say about the subject. We tapped the smart, savvy minds that keep our storage cloud up and running, and discovered a treasure trove of insights into the tech essentials that power their daily lives.

From budgeting apps to text editors to humble charging jacks, our staff share the tools they can’t live without. So, without further ado, let’s dig into the gear that keeps our collective gears turning:

Tech for Staying Connected

Solutions Engineering Director, Troy Liljedahl

As a Mac guy, I love my Airpod Pros and the way they work seamlessly with my iPhone, Macbook Pro, and iPad. But things get a little wonky when you try to use them outside of the Apple ecosystem. I tried many different wireless earbuds and settled on the Anker Soundcore Space A40 Earbuds. I’m a big fan of The Wirecutter by the New York Times (and they’re big fans of us) and they had these at the top of their list. I love the sound quality, noise canceling, and excellent battery life. My Airpod Pros are still my go to when I’m out of the house, but when I need a good headset at home for my PC and other non-Apple devices, these have become my go to earbuds.

Senior Director, Marketing, Yev Pusin

You know what I hate? Getting my phone out at inopportune times. You know what I don’t mind so much? Glancing down at my Google Pixel Watch to see that the cold call I’m receiving is being answered by my phone’s call screening and I don’t have to pick it up. Whether it’s the first version or the second, I have grown accustomed to having something on my wrist that acts as an extension of my phone. True digital bliss. 

Chief Technical Evangelist, Pat Patterson

I use my webcam a LOT: Zoom and Google Meet with coworkers, FaceTime with family and friends, webinars with the Backblaze community of developers and admins, and quick-start videos for the Backblaze YouTube channel. Ever since I got my PlexiCam Pro mount about a year ago, it’s been my secret weapon in every one of those interactions. It’s a transparent plexiglass webcam mount that hangs from the top edge of my monitor, allowing me to position my webcam in my eyeline, just above my focus. To anyone on the call, I appear to be looking directly into the camera. 

At $85, it’s not cheap, but it’s well designed and constructed, and feels like it will last forever. Highly recommended for anyone who spends a lot of time flicking their eyes between the screen and the webcam!

Tech for Devs

Senior Site Reliability Engineer, nathaniel wagner

Ah, the age old debate of Emacs versus Vim: the two most widely used editors for Linux operating systems. I solidly planted my flag on team Vim once I learned how to save and exit the program. ;)

I do aspire to one day having a computer that only runs Emacs because byte compiled Emacs is cool to me. Until I graduate to that level of wizardry, I stick to Neovim when I need to quickly edit something from a terminal or want to appear cool in front of my coworkers. I mostly use the Vim extension in Intellij for day-to-day modifying of code and configs. If you would like to also learn Vim, I really enjoyed playing through Vim Adventures, which is a free game that teaches you a lot of the shortcuts and movements in Vim.

Lead Software Engineer, Application Security, Ola Nordstrom

Continuing the discussion in favor of Vim, specifically Neovim. You only have to learn the keybindings once. There is a fantastic set of plugins to customize it to your heart’s content—Visual Studio Code has VSCodeVim, Intellij has IdeaVim, for example. Then you don’t have to relearn keybindings while switching between languages, projects, and code. 

Tmux the terminal multiplexer: like Vim, it may have a steep learning curve but once you learn it you can’t live without it. The tmux wiki has some great getting started guides. I strongly recommend remapping the leader key (mine is Caps + A, or Caps Lock + A on Windows keyboards). You can set up customized tmux scripts to re-create all your environments (one session for server code, another for a different codebase, another for your notes, and so on). Each session then has multiple windows which you can create, split, and close quickly, no need to leave your keyboard.

For web technologies, learn the toolset available in the browser developer tools. Remember to preserve logs filter to specific responses so you won’t be overwhelmed looking at messages.

Stepping away from the browser and back into the terminal, learn Curl and ag or rg. For every “old” unix command there’s likely a modern replacement that’s 100s of times faster with much more customization available. 

But there’s always the middle ground for situations where you may need to initiate a complex series of browser–webapp interactions and you need to modify or test something quickly. To do this, learn how to use Burp. In the long run it’s well worth it. It makes it a breeze to modify data between the browser and your app.

Last tip: for native code, just learn how to use the debugger.

Tusen Tack!

Tech That Makes Home Homier

Principle Site Reliability Engineer, Elliott Sims

One power adapter to rule them all: the Anker 715 Charger (Nano II 65W). This one little power adapter can power my personal laptop, work laptop, headphones, and more. With one cable, one small charger cube, and a few small USB end adapters, I can charge everything.

Senior Product Marketing Manager, James Flores 

A Roku. I use it at home for streaming apps, but I also carry one in my travel bag. There’s nothing worse than flipping through basic cable channels in a hotel when you’re traveling. Wait, yes there is—signing in to Netflix on the hotel TV and forgetting to sign out. If I travel with it, I just plug it in and I’m already signed in to all my apps. 

Senior Technical Editing Manager, Alison McClelland

I got tired of locking myself out of my own house and forgetting who I gave spare keys to, so I really appreciate this Yale Lock with Nest Connect. It works with the Nest cameras that I mostly use to see whether the UPS or DoorDash delivery person has the nerve to ring my doorbell. (Drop it and run, people!) 

It’s secure and easy-to-use; no more locking myself out of my own house in the middle of winter. I can give a code to a friend so they can feed my cats while I’m away, or create temporary passcodes so I don’t have to wait around for the cable guy.

Senior Content Editor, Molly Clancy

I have a hard time turning my brain off at night, so I used to pop in earbuds to listen to something soothing (not comfortable at all!). Then I got this Cozyband as a gift and became 100% addicted to it. I CAN fall asleep without it, but I don’t do it willingly. It’s also good for working out if you hate sweaty earbuds slipping out all the time. 

Chief Executive Officer, Gleb Budman

It gets cold in my home, and I don’t necessarily want to heat the whole place when it’s just me. A good old fashioned heated blanket does the trick. All the tech in the world won’t help you when you’re shivering. 

The Apps Have Entered the Chat

Partner Marketing Director, Jen Newman

As a working mom with two boys, I am always on the go. Both of my boys are now playing for AAA travel teams. I try my best to keep up with all their games, and LiveBarn is how I stay connected to them. It allows me to pull up a live feed or on-demand video of the game. Last weekend was a great example: they were playing at two different rinks across town. I was able to pull up one game on LiveBarn on my phone, and watch both games literally at the same time. When my older son came home and asked me if I saw his goal, I was able to say, “I heard Coach yell, ‘Nice shot, Newy!’” 

Associate Editor and Writer, Stephanie Doyle

My life changed when I adopted a password manager years ago. Before I went back to full-time corporate life in 2020, I freelanced quite a bit—which means an endless series of logins and passwords, depending on how you’re engaging with your clients. And, while I enjoy making up 13–15 character passphrases with a mix of upper and lowercase letters, at least one symbol with some outlawed symbols (but different ones on each site), and then remembering which ones I’ve used for which accounts without reusing them… Oh wait, I actually really don’t like that. I’d rather have a password manager like Bitwarden that can generate passwords, follows me device to device, and allows me to enable biometric controls. And, spoiler alert for any of my family members who diligently read my work (I’m sure): This year the whole family is getting a subscription as a gift, and I can centrally manage it for my non-tech-inclined family members.

Senior Director of Publishing, Patrick Thomas

I’m not going into the story of how I got hooked on this app, but I will tell you that CENTR’s meal planning tool is a life saver. You can set a crazy variety of dietary needs, select your meals and portions for a week, and it spits out a perfectly organized shopping list. Then, when you want to make a meal, you just pop into the app and it tells you exactly how to look like you know what you’re doing in the kitchen. It’s sort of pricey, but the amount of money I save by not ordering in or wasting food that I bought without a plan more than makes up for it.

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Kari Rivas

Hoping on the app train here. The one I can’t live without is definitely YNAB. I’m trying to get better at budgeting ahead (and get my husband and I on the same page—haha!) and I like their philosophical approach to a typically boring subject.

The “Tech Is a Tool” Answer

Principal Cloud Storage Storyteller, Andy Klein

I don’t have a favorite tech thing. I certainly use lots of them, but I would not be lost without them because I was raised without any of the current tech. I know how to tie my shoes without watching a Youtube video. Just sayin’.

Thanks, Andy

Leave it to Andy to send us off with a reminder to put the tech down sometimes, as we hope you all get a chance to do this holiday season. But, we also want to know: what’s the tech that you can’t live without? Let us know in the comments.

The post The Backblaze Team Recommends: Tech That Saves the Day appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Two announcements had the Backblaze #social Slack channel blowing up this week, both related to “Storage Technologies of the Future.” The first reported “Video of Ceramic Storage System Surfaces Online” like some kind of UFO sighting. The second, somewhat more restrained announcement heralded the release of DNA storage cards available to the general public. Yep, you heard that right—coming to a Best Buy near you. (Not really. You absolutely have to special order these babies, but they ARE going to be for sale.)

We talked about DNA storage way back in 2015. It’s been nine years, so we thought it was high time to revisit the tech and dig into ceramics as well. (Pun intended.) 

What Is DNA Storage?

The idea is elegant, really. What is DNA if not an organic, naturally occuring form of code? 

DNA consists of four nucleotide bases: adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), and guanine (G). 

In DNA storage, information is encoded into sequences of these nucleotide bases. For example, A and C might represent 0, while T and G represent 1. This encoding allows digital data, such as text, images, or other types of information, to be translated into DNA sequences. Cool!

The appeal of DNA as a storage medium lies in its density and stability, as well as its ability to store vast amounts of information in a very compact space. It also boasts remarkable durability, with the ability to preserve information for thousands of years under suitable conditions. I mean, leave it to Mother Nature to put our silly little hard drives to shame.

Back in 2015, we shared that the storage density of DNA was about 2.2 petabytes per gram. In 2017, a study out of Columbia University and the New York Genome Center put it at an incredible 215 petabytes per gram. For comparison’s sake, a WDC 22TB drive (WDC WUH722222ALE6L4) that we currently use in our data centers is 1.5 pounds or 680 grams, which nets out at 0.032TB/gram or 0.000032PB/gram.

Another major advantage is its sustainability. Estimated global data center electricity consumption in 2022 was 240–340 TWh1, or around 1–1.3% of global final electricity demand. Current data storage technology uses rare earth metals which are environmentally damaging to mine. Drives take up space, and they also create e-waste at the end of their lifecycle. It’s a challenge anyone who works in the data storage industry thinks about a lot. 

DNA storage, on the other hand, requires less energy. A 2023 study found that data writing can be achieved in the DNA movable-type storage system under normal operating temperatures ranging from about 60–113°F and can be stored at room temperature. DNA molecules are also biodegradable and can be broken down naturally. 

The DNA data-writing process is chemical-based, and actually not the most environmentally friendly, but the DNA storage cards developed by Biomemory use a proprietary biosourced writing process, which they call “a significant advancement over existing chemical or enzymatic synthesis technologies.” So, there might be some trade-offs, but we’ll know more as the technology evolves. 

What’s the Catch?

Density? Check. Durability? Wow, yeah. Sustainability? You got it. But DNA storage is still a long way from sitting on your desk, storing your duplicate selfies. First, and we said this back in 2015 too, DNA takes a long time to read and write—DNA synthesis writes at a few hundred bytes per second. An average iPhone photo would take several hours to write to DNA. And to read it, you have to sequence the DNA—a time-intensive process. Both of those processes require specialized scientific equipment.

It’s also still too expensive. In 2015, we found a study that put 83 kilobytes of DNA storage at £1000 (about $1,500 U.S. dollars). In 2021, MIT estimated it would cost about $1 trillion to store one petabyte of data on DNA. For comparison, it costs $6,000 per month to store one petabyte in Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage ($6/TB/month). You could store that petabyte for a little over 13 million years before you’d hit $1 trillion.

Today, Biomemory’s DNA storage cards ring in at a cool €1000 (about $1,080 U.S. dollars). And they can hold a whopping one kilobyte of data or the equivalent of a short email. So, yeah …it’s ahh, gotten even more expensive for the commercial product. 

The discrepancy between the MIT theoretical estimate and the cost of the Biomemory cards really speaks to the expense of bringing a technology like this to market. The theoretical cost per byte is a lot different than the operational cost, and the Biomemory cards are really meant to serve as proof of concept.  All that said, as the technology improves, one can only hope that it becomes more cost-effective in the future. Folks are experimenting with different encoding schemes to make writing and reading more efficient, as one example of an advance that could start to tip the balance.  

Finally, there’s just something a bit spooky about using synthetic DNA to store data. There’s a Black Mirror episode in there somewhere. Maybe one day we can upload kung fu skills directly into our brain domes and that would be cool, but for now, it’s still somewhat unsettling.

What Is Ceramic Storage?

Ceramic storage makes an old school approach new again, if you consider that the first stone tablets were kind of the precursor to today’s hard drives. Who’s up for storing some cuneiform?

Cerabyte, the company behind the “video that surfaced online,” is working on storage technology that uses ceramic and glass substrates in devices the size of a typical HDD that can store 10 petabytes of data. They use a glass base similar to Gorilla Glass by Corning topped with a layer of ceramic 300 micrometers thick that’s essentially etched with lasers. (Glass is used in many larger hard drives today, for what it’s worth. Hoya makes them, for example.) The startup debuted a fully operational prototype system using only commercial off-the-shelf equipment—pretty impressive. 

The prototype consists of a single read-write rack and several library racks. When you want to write data, it moves one of the cartridges from the library to the read-write rack where it is opened to expose and stage the ceramic substrate. Two million laser beamlets then punch nanoscale ones and zeros into the surface. Once the data is written, the read-write arm verifies it on the return motion to its original position. 

Cerabyte isn’t the only player in the game. Others like MDisc use similar technology. Currently, MDisc stores data on DVD-sized disks using a “rock-like” substrate. Several DVD player manufacturers have included the technology in players. 

Similar to DNA storage, ceramic storage boasts much higher density than current data storage tech—terabytes per square centimeter versus an HDD’s 0.02TB per square centimeter. Also like DNA storage, it’s more environmentally friendly. Ceramic and glass can be stored within a wide temperature range between -460°F–570°F, and it’s a natural material that will last millennia and eventually decompose. It’s also incredibly durable: Cerabyte claims it will last 5000+ years, and with tons of clay pots still laying around from ancient times, that makes sense. 

One advantage it has on DNA storage though is speed. One laser pulse writes up to 2,000,000 bits, so data can be written at GBps speeds. 

What’s the Catch?

Ceramic also has density, sustainability, and speed to boot, but our biggest question is: who’s going to need that speed? There are only a handful of applications, like AI, that require that speed now. AI is certainly having a big moment, and it can only get bigger. So, presumably there’s a market, but only a small one that can justify the cost. 

One other biggie, at least for a cloud storage provider like us, though not necessarily for consumers or other enterprise users: it’s a write-once model. Once it’s on there, it’s on there. 

Finally, much like DNA tech, it’s probably (?) still too expensive to make it feasible for most data center applications. Cerabyte hasn’t released pricing yet. According to Blocks & Files, “The cost roadmap is expected to offer cost structures below projections of current commercial storage technologies.” But it’s still a big question mark.

Our Hot Take

Both of these technologies are really cool. They definitely got our storage geek brains fired up. But until they become scalable, operationally feasible, and cost-effective, you won’t see them in production—they’re still far enough out that they’re on the fiction end of the science fiction to science fact spectrum. And there are a couple roadblocks we see before they reach the ubiquity of your trusty hard drive. 

The first is making both technologies operational, not just theoretical in a lab. We’ll know more about both Biomemory’s and Cerabyte’s technologies as they roll out these initial proof of concept cards and prototype machines. And both have plans, naturally, for scaling the technologies to the data center. Whether they can or not remains to be seen. Lots of technologies have come and gone, falling victim to the challenges of production, scaling, and cost. 

The second is the attendant infrastructure needs. Getting 100x speed is great, if the device is right next to you. But we’ll need similar leaps in physical networking infrastructure to transfer the data anywhere else. Until that catches up, the tech remains lab-bound. 

All that said, I still remember using floppy disks that held mere megabytes of data, and now you can put 20TB on a hard disk. So, I guess the question is, how long will it be before I can plug into the Matrix?

The post Storage Tech of the Future: Ceramics, DNA, and More appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

More than one billion businesses and individuals use Google Drive according to, well, a quick search on Google. If most of those one billion people are like me, they save pretty much everything there. 

Whether the data is professional or personal, the end result is a lot of important files that aren’t necessarily backed up anywhere. Maybe your school is closing your account and you need to move all of your data somewhere else. Maybe your account gets attacked by cybercriminals. Or maybe Google goes down or loses your data. In order to protect your important Google Drive files, you need to understand how to go about downloading and backing up your account. 

How to Download Your Google Drive

Most people have multiple email accounts, so first it is important to make sure you are logged in to the correct Google Account before you start this process. 

Once you’re signed in, you will want to go to Google Drive: drive.google.com. From there, you can download individual files if you don’t have that many or do a bulk download.

To download individual files:

1. Hold shift while you select all of your files.
2. Right click and select download.

To do a bulk download:

1. Go to your account at myaccount.google.com.
2. Go to Data & privacy.
3. Scroll down to the section of the page titled “Download or delete your data” and click “Download your data.” This allows you to download all of the data in your Google account (not just Google Drive) via Google Takeout.

4. Select Google Drive (and whatever other services you might want to download data from).

5. You then have a few options to select:
   1. Multiple formats: Here you can tell Google the formats of the files you want to download. For example, if you want to download documents as .docx files or as PDFs.
   2. Advanced settings: Here you can tell Google to download additional data, including previous versions and the names of your folders. 
   3. All Drive data included: Here you can select all data, or deselect specific folders if you want to.
6. Scroll down to the bottom and click on Next Step.
7. You’ll be prompted to specify your delivery method. Select Send download link via email.
8. You can then specify your frequency. You can select a single export or an export every two months for a year. For our purposes, you can select a single export. (We’ll talk about options for backing up your data more frequently later.)
9. Specify the file type and the file size you want to export.
   1. You can choose to have these files sent as a .zip file or a .tgz (tar) file. The main difference between the two options is that a .zip file compresses every file independently in the archive, but a .tgz file compresses the archive as a whole.
   2. The file size tells Google when to split your data into a separate file. Depending on the size of your data, Google may send you multiple emails with different sizes of files.

10. Click Create export.

When most people think about downloading the data they store in Google Drive, they’re thinking about the documents, photos, and other larger files they work with, but (as Google Takeout makes clear) you have a lot more data stored with Google outside of Drive.

Here’s why you might choose to export everything: 

• To have a copy of bookmarked websites. 
• To have a copy of emails that may contain files you’ve lost over time. 
• To have a copy of important voicemails from loved ones in Google’s Voice product that you want to keep forever. 

Also, when you download all of your data it is a good reminder of what information Google has of yours.

After you click Create export, you’ll get an email in a few minutes, hours, or a couple of days, depending on the size of your data, informing you that your Google data is ready to download.

How to Back Up Your Computer

You now have your Google Drive data out of the Google Cloud and on your computer. Next, you’ll want to make sure it’s backed up. Your computer can fail just like Google, so simply downloading it isn’t enough. Protecting your newly downloaded Google data with a good cloud backup strategy should be the next thing you do.

Make sure to have at least three copies of your data: two local including one on your desktop and one on a different storage medium, like a hard drive. Then, you should have one off-site, and these days that means in the cloud.  

Note that when we’re using the word “cloud” here, we specifically mean that you’re backing up to the cloud. Often using a “cloud drive” means that you’re syncing, and, as the current data loss snafu at Google shows, there’s a big difference between sync and backup.

How to Back Up Google Drive

Downloading your data once and backing it all up is a good step. But, you’re adding documents to Google Drive all the time, and downloading your data manually can get tedious if you want to make sure your work is consistently and reliably backed up. 

Of course, as we noted above, you can set your Google Drive bulk download frequency to a regular cadence. You’d still have to manually download your data and add it to your computer’s local storage, then back it up using the same method you would for your computer data. If you’re using Backblaze Computer Backup, which automatically runs in the background on your computer, those files would be backed once they entered your local storage. 

Still, that means that you have the possibility of losing files if your cadence isn’t frequent enough, and if you forget to manually download and replace those files sent to you in email, then you might run into trouble. 

Alternatively, there are a few services that will back up your Google Drive data for you. With something like Movebot, you can set up your Google Drive to sync and back up to a cloud storage service like Backblaze B2. If you’re a little more tech savvy, you can also use rclone to do the same thing. 

These tools are a bit more complex than using your Backblaze Computer Backup account, but you can configure these tools to back up your Google Drive at a frequency that makes sense for you to make sure new data is getting backed up as you add it.

Do you have any techniques on how you download your data from Google Drive or other Google products? Share them in the comments section below!

FAQ

The post How to Download Your Google Drive and Back Up Your Files appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

You can imagine data egress fees like tolls on a highway—your data is cruising along trying to get to its destination, but it has to pay a fee for the privilege of continuing its journey. If you have a lot of data to move, or a lot of toll booths (different cloud services) to move it through, those fees can add up quickly. 

Data egress fees are charges you incur for moving data out of a cloud service. They can be a big part of your cloud bill depending on how you use the cloud. And, they’re frequently a reason behind surprise AWS bills. So, let’s take a closer look at egress, egress fees, and ways you can reduce or eliminate them, so that your data can travel the cloud superhighways at will. 

What Is Data Egress?

In computing generally, data egress refers to the transfer or movement of data out of a given location, typically from within a network or system to an external destination. When it comes to cloud computing, egress generally means whenever data leaves the boundaries of a cloud provider’s network. 

In the simplest terms, data egress is the outbound flow of data.

Egress vs. Ingress?

While egress pertains to data exiting a system, ingress refers to data entering a system. When you download something, you’re egressing data from a service. When you upload something, you’re ingressing data to that service. 

Unsurprisingly, most cloud storage providers do not charge you to ingress data—they want you to store your data on their platform, so why would they? 

Egress vs. Download

You might hear egress referred to as download, and that’s not wrong, but there are some nuances. Egress applies not only to downloads, but also when you migrate data between cloud services, for example. So, egress includes downloads, but it’s not limited to them. 

In the context of cloud service providers, the distinction between egress and download may not always be explicitly stated, and the terminology used can vary between providers. It’s essential to refer to the specific terms and pricing details provided by the service or platform you are using to understand how they classify and charge for data transfers.

How Do Egress Fees Work?

Data egress fees are charges incurred when data is transferred out of a cloud provider’s environment. These fees are often associated with cloud computing services, where users pay not only for the resources they consume within the cloud (such as storage and compute) but also for the data that is transferred from the cloud to external destinations.

There are a number of scenarios where a cloud provider typically charges egress: 

• When you’re migrating data from one cloud to another.
• When you’re downloading data from a cloud to a local repository.
• When you move data between regions or zones with certain cloud providers. 
• When an application, end user, or content delivery network (CDN) requests data from your cloud storage bucket. 

The fees can vary depending on the amount of data transferred and the destination of the data. For example, transferring data between regions within the same cloud provider’s network might incur lower fees than transferring data to the internet or to a different cloud provider.

Data egress fees are an important consideration for organizations using cloud services, and they can impact the overall cost of hosting and managing data in the cloud. It’s important to be aware of the pricing details related to data egress in the cloud provider’s pricing documentation, as these fees can contribute significantly to the total cost of using cloud services.

Why Do Cloud Providers Charge Egress Fees?

Both ingressing and egressing data costs cloud providers money. They have to build the physical infrastructure to allow users to do that, including switches, routers, fiber cables, etc. They also have to have enough of that infrastructure on hand to meet customer demand, not to mention staff to deploy and maintain it. 

However, it’s telling that most cloud providers don’t charge ingress fees, only egress fees. It would be hard to entice people to use your service if you charged them extra for uploading their data. But, once cloud providers have your data, they want you to keep it there. Charging you to remove it is one way cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure do that. 

What Are AWS’s Egress Fees?

AWS S3 gives customers 100GB of data transfer out to the internet free each month, with some caveats—that 100GB excludes data stored in China and GovCloud. After that, the published rates for U.S. regions for data transferred over the public internet are as follows as of the date of publication:

• The first 10TB per month is $0.09 per GB.
• The next 40TB per month is $0.085 per GB.
• The next 100TB per month is $0.07 per GB.
• Anything greater than 150TB per month is $0.05 per GB. 

But AWS also charges customers egress between certain services and regions, and it can get complicated quickly as the following diagram shows…

How Can I Reduce Egress Fees?

If you’re using cloud services, minimizing your egress fees is probably a high priority. Companies like the Duckbill Group (the creators of the diagram above) exist to help businesses manage their AWS bills. In fact, there’s a whole industry of consultants that focuses solely on reducing your AWS bills. 

Aside from hiring a consultant to help you spend less, there are a few simple ways to lower your egress fees:

1. Use a content delivery network (CDN): If you’re hosting an application, using a CDN can lower your egress fees since a CDN will cache data on edge servers. That way, when a user sends a request for your data, it can pull it from the CDN server rather than your cloud storage provider where you would be charged egress. 
2. Optimize data transfer protocols: Choose efficient data transfer protocols that minimize the amount of data transmitted. For example, consider using compression or delta encoding techniques to reduce the size of transferred files. Compressing data before transfer can reduce the volume of data sent over the network, leading to lower egress costs. However, the effectiveness of compression depends on the nature of the data.
3. Utilize integrated cloud providers: Some cloud providers offer free data transfer with a range of other cloud partners. (Hint: that’s what we do here at Backblaze!)
4. Be aware of tiering: It may sound enticing to opt for a cold(er) storage tier to save on storage, but some of those tiers come with much higher egress fees. 

How Does Backblaze Reduce Egress Fees?

There’s one more way you can drastically reduce egress, and we’ll just come right out and say it: Backblaze gives you free egress up to 3x the average monthly storage and unlimited free egress through a number of CDN and compute partners, including Fastly, Cloudflare, Bunny.net, and Vultr. 

Why do we offer free egress? Supporting an open cloud environment is central to our mission, so we expanded free egress to all customers so they can move data when and where they prefer. Cloud providers like AWS and others charge high egress fees that make it expensive for customers to use multi-cloud infrastructures and therefore lock in customers to their services. These walled gardens hamper innovation and long-term growth.

Free Egress = A Better, Multi-Cloud World

The bottom line: the high egress fees charged by hyperscalers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft are a direct impediment to a multi-cloud future driven by customer choice and industry need. And, a multi-cloud future is something we believe in. So go forth and build the multi-cloud future of your dreams, and leave worries about high egress fees in the past. 

The post Cloud 101: Data Egress Fees Explained appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

The term hybrid cloud has been around for a while—we originally published this explainer in 2017. But time hasn’t necessarily made things clearer. Maybe you hear folks talk about your company’s hybrid cloud approach, but what does that really mean? If you’re confused about the hybrid cloud, you’re not alone. 

Hybrid cloud is a computing approach that uses both private and public cloud resources with some kind of orchestration between them. The term has been applied to a wide variety of IT solutions, so it’s no wonder the concept breeds confusion. 

In this post, we’ll explain what a hybrid cloud is, how it can benefit your business, and how to choose a cloud storage provider for your hybrid cloud strategy.

What Is the Hybrid Cloud?

A hybrid cloud is an infrastructure approach that uses both private and public resources. Let’s first break down those key terms:

• Public cloud: When you use a public cloud, you are storing your data in another company’s internet-accessible data center. A public cloud service allows anybody to sign up for an account, and share data center resources with other customers or tenants. Instead of worrying about the costs and complexity of operating an on-premises data center, a cloud storage user only needs to pay for the cloud storage they need.
• Private cloud: In contrast, a private cloud is specifically designed for a single tenant. Think of a private cloud as a permanently reserved private dining room at a restaurant—no other customer can use that space. As a result, private cloud services can be more expensive than public clouds. Traditionally, private clouds typically lived on on-premises infrastructure, meaning they were built and maintained on company property. Now, private clouds can be maintained and managed on-premises by an organization or by a third party in a data center. The key defining factor is that the cloud is dedicated to a single tenant or organization.

Those terms are important to know to understand the hybrid cloud architecture approach. Hybrid clouds are defined by a combined management approach, which means there is some type of orchestration between the private and public environments that allows workloads and data to move between them in a flexible way as demands, needs, and costs change. This gives you flexibility when it comes to data deployment and usage.  

In other words, if you have some IT resources on-premises that you are replicating or sharing with an external vendor—congratulations, you have a hybrid cloud!

Hybrid Cloud Examples

Here are a few examples of how a hybrid cloud can be used:

1. As an active archive: You might establish a protocol that says all accounting files that have not been changed in the last year, for example, are automatically moved off-premises to cloud storage archive to save cost and reduce the amount of storage needed on-site. You can still access the files; they are just no longer stored on your local systems. 
2. To meet compliance requirements: Let’s say some of your data is subject to strict data privacy requirements, but other data you manage isn’t as closely protected. You could keep highly regulated data on premises in a private cloud and the rest of your data in a public cloud. 
3. To scale capacity: If you’re in an industry that experiences seasonal or frequent spikes like retail or ecommerce, these spikes can be handled by a public cloud which provides the elasticity to deal with times when your data needs exceed your on-premises capacity.
4. For digital transformation: A hybrid cloud lets you adopt cloud resources in a phased approach as you expand your cloud presence.

Hybrid Cloud vs. Multi-cloud: What’s the Diff?

You wouldn’t be the first person to think that the terms multi-cloud and hybrid cloud appear similar. Both of these approaches involve using multiple clouds. However, multi-cloud uses two clouds of the same type in combination (i.e., two or more public clouds) and hybrid cloud approaches combine a private cloud with a public cloud. One cloud approach is not necessarily better than the other—they simply serve different use cases. 

For example, let’s say you’ve already invested in significant on-premises IT infrastructure, but you want to take advantage of the scalability of the cloud. A hybrid cloud solution may be a good fit for you. 

Alternatively, a multi-cloud approach may work best for you if you are already in the cloud and want to mitigate the risk of a single cloud provider having outages or issues. 

Hybrid Cloud Benefits

A hybrid cloud approach allows you to take advantage of the best elements of both private and public clouds. The primary benefits are flexibility, scalability, and cost savings.

Benefit 1: Flexibility and Scalability

One of the top benefits of the hybrid cloud is its flexibility. Managing IT infrastructure on-premises can be time consuming and expensive, and adding capacity requires advance planning, procurement, and upfront investment. 

The public cloud is readily accessible and able to provide IT resources whenever needed on short notice. For example, the term “cloud bursting” refers to the on-demand and temporary use of the public cloud when demand exceeds resources available in the private cloud. A private cloud, on the other hand, provides the absolute fastest access speeds since it is generally located on-premises. (But cloud providers are catching up fast, for what it’s worth.) For data that is needed with the absolute lowest levels of latency, it may make sense for the organization to use a private cloud for current projects and store an active archive in a less expensive, public cloud.

Benefit 2: Cost Savings

Within the hybrid cloud framework, the public cloud segment offers cost-effective IT resources, eliminating the need for upfront capital expenses and associated labor costs. IT professionals gain the flexibility to optimize configurations, choose the most suitable service provider, and determine the optimal location for each workload. This strategic approach reduces costs by aligning resources with specific tasks. Furthermore, the ability to easily scale, redeploy, or downsize services enhances efficiency, curbing unnecessary expenses and contributing to overall cost savings.

Comparing Private vs. Hybrid Cloud Storage Costs

To understand the difference in storage costs between a purely on-premises solution and a hybrid cloud solution, we’ll present two scenarios. For each scenario, we’ll use data storage amounts of 100TB, 1PB, and 2PB. Each table is the same format, all we’ve done is change how the data is distributed: private (on-premises) or public (off-premises). We are using the costs for our own Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage in this example. The math can be adapted for any set of numbers you wish to use.

Scenario 1    100% of data on-premises storage

Scenario 2    20% of data on-premises with 80% public cloud storage (Backblaze B2)

As you can see, using a hybrid cloud solution and storing 80% of the data in the cloud with a provider like Backblaze B2 can result in significant savings over storing only on-premises.

Choosing a Cloud Storage Provider for Your Hybrid Cloud

Okay, so you understand the benefits of using a hybrid cloud approach, what next? Determining the right mix of cloud services may be intimidating because there are so many public cloud options available. Fortunately, there are a few decision factors you can use to simplify setting up your hybrid cloud solution. Here’s what to think about when choosing a public cloud storage provider:

• Ease of use: Avoiding a steep learning curve can save you hours of work effort in managing your cloud deployments. By contrast, overly complicated pricing tiers or bells and whistles you don’t need can slow you down.
• Data security controls: Compare how each cloud provider facilitates proper data controls. For example, take a look at features like authentication, Object Lock, and encryption.
• Data egress fees: Some cloud providers charge additional fees for data egress (i.e., removing data from the cloud). These fees can make it more expensive to switch between providers. In addition to fees, check the data speeds offered by the provider.
• Interoperability: Flexibility and interoperability are key reasons to use cloud services. Before signing up for a service, understand the provider’s integration ecosystem. A lack of needed integrations may place a greater burden on your team to keep the service running effectively.
• Storage tiers: Some providers offer different storage tiers where you sacrifice access for lower costs. While the promise of inexpensive cold storage can be attractive, evaluate whether you can afford to wait hours or days to retrieve your data.
• Pricing transparency: Pay careful attention to the cloud provider’s pricing model and tier options. Consider building a spreadsheet to compare a shortlist of cloud providers’ pricing models.

When Hybrid Cloud Might Not Always Be the Right Fit

The hybrid cloud may not always be the optimal solution, particularly for smaller organizations with limited IT budgets that might find a purely public cloud approach more cost-effective. The substantial setup and operational costs of private servers could be prohibitive.

A thorough understanding of workloads is crucial to effectively tailor the hybrid cloud, ensuring the right blend of private, public, and traditional IT resources for each application and maximizing the benefits of the hybrid cloud architecture.

So, Should You Go Hybrid?

Big picture, anything that helps you respond to IT demands quickly, easily, and affordably is a win. With a hybrid cloud, you can avoid some big up-front capital expenses for in-house IT infrastructure, making your CFO happy. Being able to quickly spin up IT resources as they’re needed will appeal to the CTO and VP of operations.

So, given all that, we’ve arrived at the bottom line and the question is, should you or your organization embrace hybrid cloud infrastructure?According to Flexera’s 2023 State of the Cloud report, 72% of enterprises utilize a hybrid cloud strategy. That indicates that the benefits of the hybrid cloud appeal to a broad range of companies.

If an organization approaches implementing a hybrid cloud solution with thoughtful planning and a structured approach, a hybrid cloud can deliver on-demand flexibility, empower legacy systems, and applications with new capabilities, and become a catalyst for digital transformation. The result can be an elastic and responsive infrastructure that has the ability to quickly adapt to changing demands of the business.

As data management professionals increasingly recognize the advantages of the hybrid cloud, we can expect more and more of them to embrace it as an essential part of their IT strategy.

Tell Us What You’re Doing With the Hybrid Cloud

Are you currently embracing the hybrid cloud, or are you still uncertain or hanging back because you’re satisfied with how things are currently? We’d love to hear your comments below on how you’re approaching your cloud architecture decisions.

FAQs About Hybrid Cloud

The post What Is Hybrid Cloud? appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Have you ever felt like you need a dictionary just to understand what tech-savvy folks are talking about? Well, you’re in luck, because we’re about to decode some of the most common jargon of the digital age, one acronym at a time. Welcome to the world of “as a Service” acronyms, where we take the humble alphabet and turn it into a digital buffet. 

So, whether you’re SaaS-savvy or PaaS-puzzled, or just someone desperately searching for a little HaaS (Humor as a Service …yeah, we made that one up), you’ve come to the right place. Let’s take a big slurp from this alphabet soup of tech terms.

The One That Started It All: SaaS

SaaS stands for software as a service, and it’s the founding member of the “as a service” nomenclature. (Though, very confusingly, there’s also Sales as a Service—it’s just not shortened to SaaS. Usually.)

Imagine your software as a pizza delivery service. You don’t need to buy all the ingredients, knead the dough, and bake it yourself. Instead, you simply order a slice, and it magically appears on your table (a.k.a. screen). SaaS products are like that, but instead of pizza they serve up everything from messaging to video conferencing to email marketing to …well, really you name it. Which brings us to…

The Kind of Ironic One: XaaS

XaaS stands for, variously, “everything” or “anything” as a service. No one is really sure about the term’s provenance, but it’s a fair guess to say it came into existence when, well, everything started to become a service, probably sometime around the mid-2010s. The thinking is: if it exists in the digital realm, you can probably get it “as a service.” 

The Hardware Related Ones: HaaS, IaaS, and PaaS

HaaS (Hardware as a Service): Instead of purchasing hardware yourself, like computers, servers, networking equipment, and other physical infrastructure components, with HaaS, you can lease or rent the equipment for a given period. It would be like renting a pizza kitchen to make your specialty pies specifically for your sister’s wedding or your grandma’s birthday.

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): Infrastructure as a service is kind of like hardware as a service, but it comes with some additional goodies thrown in. Instead of renting just the kitchen, you rent the whole restaurant, chair, tables, and servers (no pun intended) included. IaaS delivers virtualized computing resources, like virtual machines, storage (that’s us!), and networking, over the internet.

PaaS (Platform as a Service): Think of PaaS as a step even further than IaaS—you’re not just renting a pizza restaurant, you’re renting a test kitchen where you can develop your award-winning pie. PaaS provides developers the ability to build, manage, and deploy applications with services like development frameworks, databases, and infrastructure management. It’s the ultimate DIY platform for tech enthusiasts.

The Bad One: RaaS

RaaS stands for Ransomware as a Service, and this is one “as a service” variant you don’t want to mess with. Basically, cybercriminals can purchase ransomware just as easily as you would purchase any app on the app store (it’s probably more complicated than that, but you get the general gist). This makes it easy for even the least savvy cybercriminal to get into the ransomware game. Not great. 

The Ones That Help With the Last One: BaaS and DRaaS

BaaS (Backup as a Service): Backup as a Service is a cloud-based data protection solution that allows individuals and organizations to back up their data to a remote cloud. (Hey! That’s us too!) Instead of managing on-premises backup infrastructure, users can securely store their data off-site, often on highly redundant and geographically distributed servers.

DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service): DRaaS stands for disaster recovery as a service, and it’s the antidote to RaaS. Of course, you need good backups to begin with, but adding DRaaS allows businesses to ensure specific recovery time objectives (RTOs, FYI) so they can get back up and running in the event they’re attacked by ransomware or there’s a natural disaster at your primary storage location. DRaaS solutions used to be made almost exclusively with the large enterprise in mind, but today, it’s possible to architect a DRaaS solution for your business affordably and easily.

The Analytical One: DaaS

DaaS stands for data as a service, and it’s your data’s personal chauffeur. It fetches the information you need and serves it up on a silver platter. DaaS offers data on-demand, making structured data accessible to users over the internet. It simplifies data sharing and access, often in real-time, without the need for complex data management.

The Development-Focused Ones: CaaS, BaaS (again), and FaaS

CaaS (Containers as a Service): CaaS simplifies the deployment, scaling, and orchestration of containerized applications. It’s the tech version of a literal container ship. The individual containers “ship” individual pieces of software, and a CaaS tool helps carry all of those individual containers. Check out container management software Docker’s logo for a visualization:

BaaS (Backend as a Service): It wouldn’t be the first time an acronym has two meanings. BaaS, in this context, provides a backend infrastructure for mobile and web app developers, offering services like databases, user authentication, and APIs. Imagine your own team of digital butlers tending to the back end of your apps. They handle all the behind-the-scenes stuff, so you can focus on making your app shine. 

FaaS (Function as a Service): FaaS is a serverless computing model where developers focus on writing and deploying individual functions or code snippets. These functions run in response to specific events, promoting scalability and efficiency in application development. It’s like having a team of tiny, code-savvy robots doing your bidding.

Go Forth and Abbreviate

Now that you’ve sampled all of the flavors the vast “as a service” world has to offer, we hope you’ve gained a clearer understanding of these sometimes confounding terms. So whether you’re a business professional navigating the cloud or just curious about the tech world, you can wield these acronyms with confidence. 

Did we miss any? I’m sure. Let us know in the comments.

The post Anything as a Service: All the “as a Service” Acronyms You Didn’t Know You Needed appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

When we first published this article, a $70 million ransom demand was unprecedented. Today, demands have reached as high as $240 million, a sum that the Hive ransomware group opened negotiations with in an attack on MediaMarkt, Europe’s largest consumer electronics retailer. 

But then, as now, the ransoms themselves are just a portion, and often a small portion, of the overall cost of ransomware. Ransomware attacks are crimes of opportunity, and there’s a lot more opportunity in the mid-market, where the odd $1 million demand doesn’t make headlines and the victims are less likely to be adequately prepared to recover. And, the cost of those recoveries is what we’ll get into today.

In this post, we’re breaking down the true cost of ransomware and the drivers of those costs.  

Read More About Ransomware

This post is a part of our ongoing series on ransomware. Take a look at our other posts for more information on how businesses can defend themselves against a ransomware attack, important industry trends, and more.

Ransom Payments Are the First Line Item

The Sophos State of Ransomware 2023 report, a survey of 3,000 IT decision makers from mid-sized organizations in 14 countries, found the average ransom payment was $1.54 million. This is almost double the 2022 figure of $812,380, and almost 10 times the 2020 average of $170,404, when we last published this article. Coveware, a security consulting firm, found that the average ransom payment for Q2 2023 was $740,144, also representing a big spike over previous quarters. While the specific numbers vary depending on sampling, both reports point to ransoms going up and up.

But, Ransoms Are Far From the Only Cost

Sophos found that the mean recovery cost excluding the ransom payment was $2.6 million when the targeted organization paid the ransom and got their data back. And, that cost was still $1.6 million when businesses used backups to restore data.

The cost of recovery comes from a wide range of factors, including:

• Downtime.
• People hours.
• Investment in stronger cybersecurity protections.
• Repeat attacks.
• Higher insurance premiums.
• Legal defense and settlements.
• Lost reputation.
• Lost business.

Downtime

When a company’s systems and data are compromised and operations come to a halt, the consequences are felt across the organization. Financially, downtime results in immediate revenue loss. And, productivity takes a significant hit as employees are unable to access critical resources, leading to missed deadlines and disrupted workflows. According to Coveware, the average downtime in Q2 2022 (the last quarter they collected data on downtime) amounted to over three weeks (24 days). And according to Sophos, 53% of survey respondents took more than one month to recover from the attack. This time should be factored in when calculating the true cost of ransomware.

People Hours

In the aftermath of a ransomware attack, a significant portion, if not all, of a company’s resources will be channeled towards the recovery process. The IT department will be at the forefront, working around the clock to restore systems to full functionality. The marketing and communications teams will shoulder the responsibility of managing crisis communications, while the finance team may find themselves in negotiations with the ransomware perpetrators. Meanwhile, human resources will be addressing employee inquiries and concerns stemming from the incident. Calculating the total hours spent on recovery may not be possible, but it’s a factor to consider in planning.

After recovery, the long term effects of a cybersecurity breach can still be felt in the workforce. In a study of the mental health impacts of cybersecurity on employees, Northwave found that physical and mental health symptoms were still existent up to a year after the cybersecurity attack, and affected both employee morale and business goals. 

Investment in Stronger Cybersecurity Protections

It is highly probable that a company will allocate a greater portion of its budget towards bolstering its cybersecurity measures after being attacked by ransomware, and rightfully so. It’s a prudent and necessary response. As attacks continue to increase in frequency, cyber insurance providers will continue to tighten requirements for coverage. In order to maintain coverage, companies will need to bring systems up to speed.

Repeat Attacks

One of the cruel realities of being attacked by ransomware is that it makes businesses a target for repeat attacks. Unsurprisingly, cybercriminals don’t always keep their promises when companies pay ransoms. In fact, paying ransoms lets cybercriminals know you’re an easy future mark. They know you’re willing to pay.

Repeat attacks happen when the vulnerability that allowed cybercriminals access to systems remained susceptible to exploitation. Copycat ransomware operators can easily exploit vulnerabilities that go unaddressed even for a few days. 

Higher Insurance Premiums

As more and more companies file claims for ransomware attacks and recoveries and ransom demands continue to increase, insurers are upping their premiums. In essence, insurers have been confronted with the stark reality that the financial toll exacted by ransomware incidents far exceeds what was once anticipated. In response to this growing financial strain, insurance providers are left with little choice but to raise their premiums. This uptick in premiums reflects the increasing risk landscape of the digital age, where the ever-evolving tactics and sophistication of cybercriminals necessitate a recalibration of risk assessment models and pricing structures within the insurance industry. 

Legal Defense and Settlements

When attacks affect consumers or customers, victims can expect to hear from the lawyers. After a 2021 ransomware attack, payroll services provider UKG agreed to a $6 million settlement. And, big box stores like Target and Home Depot both paid settlements in the tens of millions of dollars following breaches. Even if your information security practices would hold up in court, for most companies, it’s cheaper to settle than to suffer a protracted legal battle.

Lost Reputation and Lost Business

When ransomware attacks make headlines and draw public attention, they can erode trust among customers, partners, and stakeholders. The perception that a company’s cybersecurity measures were insufficient to protect sensitive data and systems can lead to a loss of credibility. Customers may question the safety of their personal information. 

Rebuilding a damaged reputation is a challenging and time-consuming process, requiring transparent communication, proactive security improvements, and a commitment to regaining trust. Ultimately, the impact of reputation loss goes beyond financial losses, as it can significantly affect an organization’s long-term viability and competitiveness in the market.

What You Can Do About It: Defending Against Ransomware

The business of ransomware is booming with no signs of slowing down, and the cost of recovery is enough to put some ill-prepared companies out of business. If it feels like the cost of a ransomware recovery is out of reach, that’s all the more reason to invest in harder security protocols and disaster recovery planning sooner rather than later.

For more information on the ransomware economy, the threat small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) are facing, and steps you can take to protect your business, download The Complete Guide to Ransomware.

Cost of Ransomware FAQs

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