Dropsuite Grows Business 400% Over 3 Years While Improving Customer Experiences Using Amazon S3

Dropsuite was initially launched as a website backup service for organizations in Singapore, Japan, and the United States. It stores user data online using Amazon S3 in multiple AWS Regions. Amazon S3 requires no up-front investment, and the company paid only for the storage it used as it expanded its service offerings. In 2016, the company gained traction in Europe and expanded into South America, and it went public on the Australian Securities Exchange.

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Dropsuite began to grow at a massive scale to meet the increasing number of companies seeking flexible solutions in the cloud to facilitate online collaboration. The company experienced 70 percent growth year over year for 3 years, benefiting from the virtually unlimited scalability of Amazon S3 to dynamically meet its customers’ storage needs. The ability to scale by number of customers and their storage growth helped Dropsuite to seamlessly add features like email archive and backup for popular productivity suites. With every new launch, customers experienced the same Amazon S3 reliability, which accelerated overall growth.

By 2022, Dropsuite’s revenue had grown 400 percent all while optimizing its cloud storage costs. “You think about our 400 percent growth, and that translates into user growth and data growth,” says Manoj Kalyanaraman, chief technology officer at Dropsuite. “Amazon S3 is a massively scalable storage service that we use to serve our growing number of customers worldwide. By optimizing our Amazon S3 usage, we can stretch our IT budgets and extend the impact of our technology.” All told, in 3 years, Dropsuite scaled to securely store more than 50 billion objects in Amazon S3 for its customers, including emails for more than one million users.

As the COVID-19 pandemic waned, Dropsuite focused even more on optimizing its infrastructure. For greater insights into its cloud storage operations, the Dropsuite infrastructure team uses Amazon S3 Storage Lens, which delivers organization-wide visibility into Amazon S3 storage and activity trends while making actionable recommendations to optimize costs and apply data protection best practices. “Using S3 Storage Lens, we get a macro view with filters at the bucket and Region levels, leading to transformative architecture design conversations,” says Kalyanaraman. “We use insights from S3 Storage Lens to analyze compression algorithms, look at methods of storage, and make decisions about removing and managing data for customers. Without S3 Storage Lens, we wouldn’t have this granular usage data to examine, visualize, and act on.”

Using S3 Storage Lens, Dropsuite also gathers more data into how customers use its solutions. The company uses S3 Storage Lens weekly to analyze the 50 billion objects in Amazon S3 storage to help customers further optimize their storage solutions. “As we experience rapid business growth, we use Amazon S3 to face some interesting challenges, like how we verify that our customers’ data is accessible, high performing, and, at the same time, reliable,” says Kalyanaraman. “S3 Storage Lens also gives us visibility into customer data usage patterns. With such valuable information now available to us, we’ve been able to use Amazon S3 storage classes more effectively.”

Based on insights from S3 Storage Lens, Dropsuite began to explore the diverse range of Amazon S3 storage classes to determine the optimal storage for the access frequency, resiliency, and cost requirements of specific workloads. For specific data storage needs that are based on access patterns, Dropsuite turned to the Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes, which are purpose-built for infrequently or rarely accessed data. Dropsuite implemented data vaulting, which meant it packaged backup copies as large files and stored them using Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, an archive storage class that delivers the lowest-cost storage for long-lived data that is rarely accessed and requires retrieval in milliseconds. “Using Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval gives us the best of both worlds: instant access to data stored in an extremely cost-effective manner,” says Kalyanaraman.

Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes offer flexible access to archived data at the lowest-cost storage in the cloud—along with the highest levels of security, durability, and scalability. “We can access our archived data in milliseconds and immediately render it to our customers,” Kalyanaraman says. “Backup is one of those businesses where you don’t need the backup until you really need it. And when you need it, you suddenly need it urgently and immediately. By designing our solutions on top of Amazon S3, we can deliver on our customers’ requirements. We mimic our customers’ usage patterns and store their data in an optimized way. With our data in S3, our customers can search, package, retrieve, and restore data at a very fast pace.”

Dropsuite customers also benefit from the encryption, access control, and auditing features of Amazon S3. Amazon S3 automatically applies server-side encryption as a base level of encryption for each new object unless a different encryption option is specified. “Customers and partners will ask us how we verify that data at rest is encrypted and secured,” says Adrian Loke, director of infrastructure and data protection officer at Dropsuite. “When customers know we are hosted on AWS and Amazon S3, it gives us a huge lift. Amazon S3 provides us with truly unmatched cloud storage security.”

Amazon S3 also applies S3 Block Public Access by default to all new buckets, blocking public access so that Dropsuite customers can define their own access control policies. At the bucket level, customers can establish blanket network restrictions and define specific permissions on individual objects, controlling which users and applications have access.