Wasabi Cloud Storage Review

Wasabi offers full compatibility with Amazon S3 and AWS IAM APIs, so you can readily expand your existing S3 buckets with Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage. You can use the same set of tools with S3 and Wasabi, and it allows you to integrate the same apps on both platforms. To do this, you can generate access keys for use with the Wasabi S3 endpoint.

Wasabi storage provides various security features, including encryption, private connections and access controls. It supports encryption in transit and at rest. For access controls, it offers identity and access management (IAM) policies, bucket policies, multi-factor authentication and more.

Besides its Hot Cloud Storage, Wasabi has other products, including: 

• Wasabi AiR Intelligent Media Storage
• Wasabi Cloud NAS
• Wasabi Direct Connect
• Wasabi Object Replication 

As expected, these tools readily integrate and work with Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage, making entry into the Wasabi ecosystem seamless.

To ensure data durability and availability, Wasabi offers Object Replication. This makes copies of your objects across Wasabi regions, leaving your data less susceptible to permanent loss. Even so, the buckets that receive replicas of your objects must have the same versioning status, geographic continent and owner as the original bucket.

Wasabi supports REST API operations, including common HTTP methods like GET, PUT, POST, DELETE and HEAD, as well as less common ones like MOVE and OPTIONS. However, Wasabi doesn’t support the SOAP protocol.

You can generate access keys and secret keys for programmatic access to your Wasabi account. These keys are particularly useful when integrating applications with your Wasabi storage.

Wasabi has an identity and access management (IAM) system, which allows you to delegate access to users, groups and roles with restricted privileges. Wasabi’s IAM is one of various access control features available in your environment, and it’s particularly great for ensuring fine-grained access.

To use Wasabi Cloud Storage, sign in to the console either as the root user or, preferably, as an IAM user or subuser. Once signed in, follow the steps below to upload objects to your bucket:

1. Create a Bucket

   From the console’s left-side menu, click on “Buckets” to go into the buckets dashboard. From the next page, click on Create Bucket to generate a bucket. You’ll get a pop-up where you can specify the bucket name, region and other properties. Click the “Create Bucket” button to complete the bucket creation process.

   

2. Upload an Object

   After creating the bucket, click on your bucket from the buckets dashboard. On the next page, click on Upload Files to upload an object into your bucket. You’ll get a pop-up that lets you drag and drop items, or you can browse your local system for files and folders.

   Note that you cannot upload more than 5,000 objects from the Wasabi Console. To upload over 5,000 objects, you may use Cyberduck, AWS CLI or another recommended option.

   

3. Start the Upload

   After selecting a file or folder, you can repeat the previous step to add more items to the upload. When you’re done selecting, you can add tags and configure the Additional Checksums to ensure data integrity, or you can click on Start Upload to initiate the upload. If the upload completes successfully, you’ll have your files in the bucket.

   

Wasabi charges $6.99 per TB per month for pay-as-you-go storage across all regions, even if you use less than 1TB in a month. You’re also expected to use the storage for at least 90 days — if you don’t, you’ll get charged for the remaining days within your expected 90-day storage duration.

It doesn’t charge for ingress, egress and API requests. However, if your monthly egress exceeds your active storage volume, you may not benefit from the free egress, and your storage may even be limited or suspended.

Similarly, if your application overburdens the Wasabi infrastructure and is non-validated, you may not benefit from free API requests, and your resources may be limited or suspended.

Wasabi offers discounted rates when you commit to using storage for one, three or five years. The discount value depends on the volume of storage reserved and the length of the reservation. 

If you use more storage than you reserved, the excess storage will be charged at pay-as-you-go rates plus 7%. However, if you use less than your capacity, the unused portion is not brought forward to the next month.

Reserved capacity storages have a minimum storage duration of 30 days. If you use the storage for less than the minimum storage duration, you’ll incur an extra charge equal to the remaining days.

Wasabi does not have a free plan, but it offers a 30-day free trial, during which you get full access and up to one terabyte (1TB) of storage. This free trial does not require you to provide a payment method, and there’s no auto-renewal after the trial period ends.

Wasabi Storage is so cheap because it typically charges only for storage; there are no fees for ingress, egress and API requests within certain usage limits.

During the upload and download, there was some priority for the larger files, but even so, the transfer proceeded smoothly. The upload time was consistent, averaging seven minutes and three seconds in two runs. The download speed was also consistent, with an average of seven minutes and 19 seconds.

All in all, many factors impact transfer speeds between your local system and Wasabi. Top factors include your bandwidth and proximity to the data center. Closer proximities and larger bandwidths enable faster transfer speeds. For this speed analysis, we chose the eu-central-1 region as it was one of the closest to the test PC in Ireland, so distance would have less effect on latency.

For account security, Wasabi offers multi-factor authentication, multi-user authentication and single sign-on. With multi-user authentication, you can assign contacts who must sign off on certain activities in your account — of course, said contacts will sign off only when they confirm the authorized activities.

Aside from those features, your Wasabi account has IAM policies that let you create users, groups and roles, just like in AWS. With this feature, you can make users with least-privilege access and avoid using the root user, minimizing the risks of unauthorized access. You can also prevent concurrent Wasabi Console sessions for the same IAM user in your account.

When it comes to data security, Wasabi allows you to encrypt data at rest using server-side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C), ensuring restricted access. However, providers like AWS provide more than one way to encrypt your data.

Besides encryption, Wasabi offers object lock, which makes data in your buckets immutable. Of course, immutability ensures data integrity, and by default, Wasabi prevents the deletion of an account with object lock buckets.

Wasabi also has a replication feature that lets you make your data redundant in different regions, preventing permanent data loss in case of disaster.

With multiple access control features for your account and the objects in your bucket, the chances of unauthorized access are extremely low. More likely than not, unauthorized access would result from human error, but aside from that, you should be good.

The objects in your Wasabi buckets are encrypted using AES-256 encryption through the encryption keys you provide. Considering the AES-256 algorithm’s strong security, you don’t have to worry about the encryption infrastructure — you just have to prevent unauthorized access to your encryption keys.

Wasabi’s encryption model is zero-knowledge in the sense that you encrypt your data with keys available to you alone, so only you can decrypt the data. Wasabi has no access to your secret key, so it can’t decrypt your data and therefore doesn’t know what objects you upload to your bucket. Of course, this ensures your privacy.

Wasabi’s privacy policy states that it collects various user information, including your name, phone number, email address, usage data and device information. The service collects this information primarily during account creation. Even so, Wasabi may also collect interaction information through cookies when you use its website and services.

Wasabi states that it uses the collected information for communication and to improve the user experience. It may also share collected information with legal authorities and third parties. However, you can delete or modify its access to your information. 

Plus, remember, due to the zero-knowledge encryption, it’s impossible for Wasabi to share anything beyond that basic customer information.

Live chat messages on the Wasabi website (and those made through other channels) are redirected to the support email. That means the speed and quality of the live chat support ultimately depend on the email support capabilities. 

That said, the Wasabi support team is designed to respond to Premium support users within 15 minutes, 30 minutes and four hours for Severity 1, Severity 2 and Severity 3 issues, respectively. Responses to Severity 4 issues may take up to 10 business days.