Service · Cloud and hosting

S3-compatible object storage

Object storage answers two needs that are easy to confuse until you have watched both work. It takes off the application server everything heavy that will never change again: product photographs, scanned invoices, attachments, recordings. And it keeps copies beyond your own network, somewhere an intruder who came in through a workstation cannot follow. That second use has become the decisive one. Modern ransomware starts by hunting down the copies and deleting them, precisely so that not paying stops being an option. S3-compatible space with object locking takes that away from it.

Off network
copies beyond the reach of an intruder
Locking
an object cannot be erased before its date
Metered
billed on the gigabytes actually held
EU
storage with a European provider

Where this service reaches

The storage plugs into what you already run: backup software, a website, a shop, a document system or an application written for you.

Put your scope to an engineer

Choosing a provider

S3-compatible offerings from OVHcloud, Scaleway or another European operator, compared on price per terabyte, region, the cold storage tier and above all what it costs to pull data back out.

Buckets and encryption

One bucket per purpose, backups, archives, application files, with server-side encryption and an access rule written down rather than inferred from whatever the defaults were.

Object locking

Object Lock in compliance mode: for the period set, nobody deletes or overwrites an object, not even an administrator whose credentials have been stolen.

Where backups land

Servers, databases and Microsoft 365 content are deposited automatically on the schedule held by your backup software, with nothing to do by hand each day.

Keys and least privilege

Each system receives a key of its own, scoped to exactly what that system does. The backup software may write; erasing is not granted. Keys live in a password manager of yours and get rotated.

Lifecycle

Ageing objects drop to a cheaper class on their own, or vanish when the retention period you set expires. Nobody sorts anything by hand.

The way an engagement runs

The configuration itself is short. It is the first upload that takes time, and how long depends on the upstream speed of your connection.

01

The requirement

What you keep, for how long, how fast it has to come back, and which obligations set the retention period in the first place.

02

Configuration

Buckets, keys, rights, locking and lifecycle rules, written up in a short note that stays with you.

03

Connecting it

The storage is joined to the backup software or straight to the application, then the first upload is started and watched through to the end.

04

Trial restore

We pull back data chosen at random and check that it genuinely opens. Until that test passes, the work is not treated as finished.

Look at the price of getting data out, not only the price of keeping it. Holding a terabyte costs very little. Retrieving it is a separate line on the tariff, which some providers bill per gigabyte pulled and sometimes per request as well. The day you restore four terabytes after an incident, the invoice can exceed several months of subscription. Before choosing, we therefore work out two numbers: the monthly cost of keeping the data and the cost of a full restore. European offers without egress charges often reorder the ranking.

Questions and answers

Those two exist so that people can work on documents, and they faithfully replicate every change, ransomware edits included. Object storage is instead driven by programs across an S3 interface, scales to hundreds of terabytes without altering its logic, and can forbid a file from being modified at all. It is a vault, not a workspace.

That depends on what the data is. Periods that apply to accounting records, payslips or medical files are set by legislation, so confirm them with your accountant, your legal adviser or your data protection officer. For everyday copies a sensible pattern fits into three numbers: fourteen daily copies, eight weekly, twelve monthly.

Yes, server-side by default. For anything sensitive we add encryption performed by the backup software before the upload, so the provider only ever stores blocks it cannot read. The key stays with you, in your password manager, with an offline spare, because a lost key makes the archive permanently useless.

You pay the provider for gigabytes held and, where applicable, for data pulled back out. Our part is the setup, billed at EUR 95/hour excl. VAT for time spent. Watching the uploads and running trial restores afterwards fits into a Start, Business or Premium plan.

The storage has to appear in your record of processing activities, with the region, the name of the processor and the retention period. Backups also complicate erasure requests, since data deleted in production stays in the copies until they expire. The CNIL accepts that gap where it is documented and bounded in time, and we give you the wording to record.

Open S3 storage in Europe

Tell us what you need to keep, how much of it there is and which software you back up with today. We configure the storage and verify a restore.

When we are around
Weekdays, 8:00 to 18:00 CET; answers land inside one working day
Talking it through
A call on Teams or Google Meet, whenever writing is not enough

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