As more organizations have turned to the cloud to store their documents and other important files, managing cloud storage costs and reducing the risk of overspending has become critical in today's changing business environments.
In order to help protect business data and lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) within Google Cloud Storage, Google has made two new Object Lifecycle Management (OLM) rules available to its customers.
Many organizations that leverage OLM protect their data against accidental deletion using Object Versioning. However, storage capacity and monthly charges associated with old versions of objects can grow quickly without the ability to automatically delete versioned objects based on their age.
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For this reason, Google has introduced its new non-current time condition which allows customers to filter based on archive time and use it to apply any or all lifecycle actions that are already supported such as delete and change storage class. Now Google Cloud Storage customers can set a lifecycle condition to delete an object that is no longer useful to them, thus reducing their overall TCO.
Custom timestamps
Google's second new cloud storage feature is the ability to set a custom timestamp in the metadata field to assign a lifecycle management condition to OLM.
Up until now, the only timestamp that could be used for OLM was given to an object when writing to the cloud storage bucket. However, the object creation timestamp may not actually be the date an organization cares about the most.
For instance if an organization migrated data to Google Cloud Storage from another environment, it may want to preserve the original create dates before the transfer. Users can now set a specific date and time and apply lifecycle rules to objects with all existing actions, including delete and change storage class being supported.
Business running applications such as cloud backup and disaster recovery can benefit from this new feature by preserving the original creation date of an object when ingesting data into Google Cloud Storage.
Google's new Object Lifecycle Management rules are now generally available and could be quite useful to organizations that want to continue using the company's cloud storage service without running up a massive bill each month.
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