According to the IDC, by 2025, unstructured data is projected to make up around 80% of an organization's data, with an annual growth rate estimated between 55-65%. This surge in unstructured data has prompted many organizations to seek cost-effective solutions for storing data in public clouds to reduce on-premise storage expenses. While IBM Storage Scale customers focused on data analytics or AI/ML have likely explored offloading cold data to the public cloud, for the bulk of IBM Storage Scale customers though, the ability to tier, archive or replicate data to public cloud is not commonly exploited. 

IBM Storage Scale AFM to Cloud Object Storage (COS) presents a seamless solution for achieving these objectives with minimal complexity. Despite its capabilities, many IBM Storage Scale customers remain unaware of this feature and have yet to leverage it to optimize their on-premise storage costs.

This guide addresses the following common use cases for AFM to Cloud Object Storage:

• How to efficiently tier data to the cloud for disk space savings by offloading old or cold data.
• Sharing data across different IBM Storage Scale clusters or applications using a public cloud provider.
• Leveraging a public cloud service provider for disaster recovery or compliance with regulatory requirements for off-premise data copies.

This guide is intended to help IBM Technical Sellers, Business Partners and IBM customers learn how to use to IBM Storage Scale AFM to Cloud to offload cold data to the cloud, how to cache data from the cloud, how to share data using the cloud and finally how to replicate and/or backup data from on-premise IBM Storage Scale clusters to one or more public cloud service providers.