The rise of public cloud services has fundamentally reshaped enterprise IT. Offloading infrastructure management to third-party providers is now the norm, freeing IT teams from the daily grind of maintaining on-premises systems. However, the more you use the public cloud, the more you might discover that it isn’t the perfect solution for every use case.

The public cloud makes cost management, data governance, security, and performance optimisation challenging, but its biggest problem is the lack of control enterprises need to manage data and access at scale.

Those challenges have led many companies to reevaluate their storage strategies and consider hybrid approaches that leverage cloud and on-premises solutions like Dell ECS.

Below, we provide a comparison of on-premises and public cloud based on Dell research to help your organisation choose based on their economic benefits.

Key findings

Dell analysed cloud and on-prem storage costs based on the following:

  • Total storage requirement: 3 PB (Petabytes) of data
  • Asset life: 5 years
  • Monthly data retrieval: 3% of total data, approximately 92 TB
  • Average object size: 0.5 MB
  • Asset life: 5 years
  • Monthly data retrieval: 3% of total data, approximately 92 TB
  • Average object size: 0.5 MB

The pricing is based on a standard access model suitable for modern applications and Internet of Things (IoT) data.

It discovered these costs in cents per GB per month:

  • Dell ECS: 0.58 cents
  • Public Cloud Active Storage: 2.40 cents (76% higher than Dell ECS)
  • Public Cloud Archive Storage: 1.58 cents (63% higher than Dell ECS)
  • Public Cloud Cold Archive Storage: 1.16 cents (50% higher than Dell ECS)

The cost includes the upfront investment and total operating expenses over the 5-year period for both on-prem and public cloud.

Capacity utilisation

Public cloud providers typically charge based on utilised capacity, with costs increasing linearly as storage needs grow. On-premises solutions like Dell ECS can offer economies of scale, potentially reducing per-gigabyte costs as capacity increases.

Asset lifecycle value

On-premises storage solutions enable longer asset lifecycles, with many organisations assigning a 4–5-year lifespan to object storage systems. This extended amortisation period can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership compared to the ongoing monthly fees associated with cloud storage.

Performance and bandwidth costs

Cloud providers may charge additional fees for increased performance or data egress. On-premises solutions typically don’t incur these extra costs, which can lead to more predictable expenses, especially for workloads with high data access requirements.

Data access patterns

Data access patterns significantly impact storage costs, particularly when comparing on-premises and cloud solutions. The ESG study, which assumed a 3% monthly data retrieval rate, demonstrated that on-premises solutions like Dell ECS have substantial cost advantages for workloads frequently accessing large amounts of data.

If you would like to learn more about On-premises object storage vs public cloud and how DSI Technology solutions can help you with your storage strategy please do get in touch.