Scale Unstructured Data Without Scaling Your Infrastructure Team
Cloud object storage provides unlimited scale for unstructured data — backups, media assets, logs, data lake files, and application artifacts — at a fraction of the cost of on-premises storage, with built-in durability, versioning, and lifecycle management.
What RLM Delivers on Cloud Object Storage
Object storage is the foundation of cloud-native data architecture — but choosing the right tier, designing the lifecycle policy, and controlling egress costs requires advisory that goes beyond the defaults.
How We Approach Cloud Object Storage
Our cloud advisory runs from discovery and market evaluation through vendor selection and post-deployment optimization — scoped to the Cloud Object Storage decision in front of you.
Storage Inventory & Classification
We catalog your unstructured data — volume, access frequency, retention requirements, and compliance obligations — and classify it into tiers (hot, warm, cold, archive) that determine the optimal object storage configuration.
Platform & Tier Evaluation
We evaluate S3, Azure Blob Storage, GCS, and object storage alternatives — including Cloudflare R2 and Backblaze B2 for egress-sensitive workloads — against your access patterns, durability requirements, and cost profile.
Lifecycle Policy Design
Automated lifecycle rules that move objects between storage tiers based on age or access patterns dramatically reduce storage costs without requiring manual intervention. We design policies aligned to your data retention requirements.
Access Architecture & Cost Control
Object storage access patterns drive egress costs. We design the access architecture — CDN integration, VPC endpoints, cross-region replication policies — that minimizes egress spend while maintaining availability.
Cloud Object Storage Evaluation Criteria
The questions below are the ones that decide whether a Cloud Object Storage investment pays back — and the ones vendors are least eager to answer.
Durability & Availability SLA
Standard object storage (S3, GCS, Azure Blob) offers 11-nines durability. Evaluate whether higher availability tiers (multi-region redundancy) are required for your most critical data.
Storage Tier Cost vs. Access Latency
Archive tiers (Glacier, Azure Archive, GCS Coldline) offer dramatically lower storage costs but significant retrieval latency and cost. Evaluate retrieval SLAs for each data classification before committing to archive tiers.
Egress Cost Exposure
Object storage charges for data transfer out to the internet and between regions. Evaluate your access patterns and architecture for egress cost exposure — often the hidden driver of high object storage bills.
Lifecycle Automation Maturity
Manual data management doesn't scale. Evaluate the sophistication of lifecycle policy support — event-driven transitions, tag-based policies, cross-bucket rules — against your data governance requirements.
Compliance & Immutability Features
Regulated data retention requires immutable storage with WORM capabilities. Evaluate Object Lock, compliance mode retention, and audit logging features for your compliance requirements.
Multi-Cloud Portability
Data stored in proprietary object storage formats can be difficult to migrate. Evaluate S3-compatible APIs and the portability of your data if your cloud strategy evolves.
"RLM helped us rationalize our multi-cloud spend and identify over $1.2M in annual savings. Their approach was methodical and unbiased — exactly what we needed."
Every engagement is measured against the baseline we establish at the start — not against a vendor’s projection.
Where This Matters Most
Sector-specific considerations we see repeatedly in cloud and managed services engagements.
A Sample of the Cloud & Managed Services Providers We Evaluate
RLM is vendor neutral. These are among 600+ providers in our evaluation set — inclusion here is not an endorsement, and we are paid by the provider you choose, not by any provider in particular. How that works →
Ready to Move on Cloud Object Storage?
Start with a no-cost conversation with an RLM cloud advisor — vendor neutral, no agenda, just clarity on the right path forward.
Talk to a Cloud Advisor