Introducing Cloud Cold Storage, affordable, accessible, air‑gapped archiving made easy 🧊

We’re excited to announce the launch of Cloud Cold Storage (CCS), a friction‑free, ultra‑low‑cost archival service built for safeguarding your data long‑term, without restore delays, or hidden fees.

🔍 Why it’s different

• Dedicated media per customer or workload

  Unlike traditional hyperscale archive platforms, where your data is sliced across pooled media, each Cloud Cold Storage customer gets their own dedicated storage media. That means when you request your data, the system reactivates only your media, not a conglomerate of drives. That translates into rapid retrievals: terabytes of data streamed back in minutes rather than days.

• No egress or restore fees

  While many archive services charge for retrieval or data transfer, Cloud Cold Storage doesn’t. You pay only for storage, and if you ever need your data back, the download is entirely fee-free.

• Rock‑bottom pricing

  At just $1.55 per TB per month (roughly $0.00155/GB/month), CCS undercuts major cloud archive offerings. Plus there’s a free 14‑day trial with no credit card required.

• Eco‑friendly air‑gap storage

  Because your data sits offline until needed, CCS dramatically reduces power and cooling overhead. That not only cuts costs, but also shrinks the carbon footprint of your archive data.

🎯 Perfect for…

Whether you’re managing vast research datasets, AI/ML training archives, video surveillance repositories, healthcare records, or media and entertainment assets, CCS offers a seamless upgrade:

• Research & Education: Ideal for institutions dealing with genomics data, scientific archives, or digital preservation. Integrated S3 Glacier‑compatible APIs mean you can plug into existing workflows and enjoy fast retrieval without surprise charges.

• Media & Entertainment: Store dormant or legacy projects ready to monetise and extract value in the future, without waiting on slow restores or paying egress fees.

• Healthcare & compliance: Archive sensitive records with air‑gapped security and predictable costs, without the need to manage on premise systems.

🚀 Getting started is simple

Ready to archive?

1. Sign up for a no‑credit‑card trial, just your email and you’ll be set up in minutes.

2. Upload via standard Amazon S3 Glacier interface.

3. When you need retrieve data, expect high‑speed streaming, usually in just a few minutes, with no extra charges.

🕰️ What are you waiting for?

For anyone who values trustworthy, long-term data preservation without complexity or budget risk, this is archival reimagined.

Want to see how it works in your workflow? Try it free today, or get in touch—we’d love to help plan your long‑haul archive.

Preserving Science: The case for scalable, sustainable cloud based data archiving

In an era of data-intensive science, we are facing a quiet but growing crisis: how to sustainably preserve the sheer volume of data produced by modern research, while ensuring it remains accessible, verifiable, and usable for future generations.

Whether it’s genomics, climate modelling, particle physics, or AI training sets, scientific workflows are generating petabytes of data, often at speeds outpacing our capacity to store, curate, and retrieve them meaningfully. As data volumes grow, so too does the risk of digital obsolescence, fragmented access, excessive power usage and prohibitive storage costs.

The imperative for low-cost, long-term scientific data storage

High-value research data cannot be treated as disposable. Institutions like Cambridge University Press and members of the Digital Preservation Coalition recognise that scientific knowledge is a cultural asset, and digital preservation is fundamental to scholarly continuity. Yet traditional cloud storage models are often cost-prohibitive for long-term retention, especially when retrieval fees and unpredictable egress costs are factored in.

Scientific institutions need archiving solutions that:

• Are cost-effective enough to scale with exponential data growth.

• Provide independent, verifiable storage with transparent metadata and integrity guarantees.

• Allow easy and timely retrieval, not only for the data producers but also for external collaborators, auditors, and future researchers.

Bridging infrastructure and stewardship: a new model for research storage

Platforms like Cloud Cold Storage are increasingly relevant in hybrid data infrastructures, where active AI and high-performance computing workloads coexist with vast, infrequently accessed datasets. Digital Realty’s AI-ready architectures emphasize the need for tiered data strategies—optimising hot storage for real-time inference while offloading reference datasets, training corpora, or audit logs to low-cost cold storage layers. This approach not only ensures performance but dramatically reduces energy and operational costs.

At the same time, organisations such as Arkivum highlight the importance of policy-driven, compliant data stewardship throughout the data lifecycle and Cambridge University Library have a blue print for an open source data repository for searchable research data. Arkivum advocate for digital archiving aligned with FAIR principles, ensuring that data remains Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable, while adhering to strict regulatory frameworks such as GDPR, GxP, and HIPAA. This becomes particularly critical in sectors like healthcare, higher education, and pharmaceutical research, where data integrity, provenance, and chain of custody must be verifiable years, or even decades, after collection. While this post by University of Cambridge Library discusses how to embed scalable preservation activities into normal workflows with no specialist DP required in an open environment that is inclusive with research data accessible to all .

These approaches signal a growing convergence between infrastructure efficiency and responsible data curation: hybrid architectures underpinned by cold storage provide the technical foundation, while governance frameworks like those Arkivum supports provide the operational assurance. For scientific institutions seeking both scalability and sustainability, this model represents a compelling blueprint for long-term research data strategy.

Preservation is no longer optional

Scientific rigour demands reproducibility. But reproducibility depends on access, not only to published findings but to the underlying data itself. As preservation responsibilities shift from short-term research projects to long-term institutional strategy, infrastructure must adapt. The tools and platforms used to store this data must be transparent, affordable, and compatible with how science is done today, and tomorrow.

What next?

As research institutions, data architects, and funders consider their long-term preservation strategies, the conversation must evolve beyond simple backups or “just-in-case” storage. We must treat archival storage as a foundational layer of scientific infrastructure.

To explore emerging models of scientific data preservation, including low-cost cold storage with guaranteed access, visit CloudColdStorage.com/research.

Ensure the science produced today can be verified, built upon, and trusted in the decades to come.