148 It may sound counter-intuitive at first, but one of the drivers fuelling multi-cloud’s momentum is cost savings. How would you be saving money if you store your data in multiple clouds? Well, here’s how: By leveraging the optimum, most cost-effective cloud services for your workload at any given time, across all cloud service providers (as opposed to just one) By avoiding data access/transfer costs and egress fees levied by cloud service providers (no data moving required) By using your newly found freedom and independence (from vendor lock-in that is) as bargaining chip and meaningful leverage to negotiate better pricing from cloud service providers (fair game) By claiming an insurance policy against cloud services downtime (it does happen). Hard to have a better data availability than when replicating across multiple clouds. But keeping your data on multiple clouds does come with its own headaches: Maintaining data consistency across various locations Searching for data across multiple locations Retrieving data you need from the optimum location Dealing with each cloud provider idiosyncrasies in terms of custom APIs, extensions, data formats, management tools, security models, etc. This is where Zenko, Scality’s new Multi-Cloud Data Controller, comes in. Zenko was designed from the ground-up to address all these challenges, making it not only possible but easy to achieve all the above-mentioned cost savings, without any of the downsides. A multi-cloud data controller is the key to unlocking the value of data and the power of cloud storage through total data transparency. Scality first introduced Zenko into the open source community in the summer of 2017, delivering a unique platform positioned to support multi-cloud use cases. In September 2018, both the open source and enterprise editions of Zenko were released, paving the way for advanced capabilities such as: Extensible storage locations and multi-cloud location control Unified interface across managed locations Federated security management Data storage in native cloud format In-band and out-of-band data and metadata updates Metadata-driven, policy-based data management Metadata search Cloud-based management portal Give it a try: Download and try Zenko 1.0 open source edition Learn more about Zenko 1.0 enterprise edition Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash