Enterprise procurement often defaults to familiar names. RFPs go out listing "enterprise cloud storage" requirements. By the time contracts reach legal review, many alternatives with better economics or stronger compliance features still haven't made it into the comparison set.
Canopy, an independent cloud broker and Open Cloud Coalition member, gives enterprises real-time side-by-side comparisons across providers before decisions are made. Today, Akave Cloud joins their marketplace as a verifiable storage option with flat-rate pricing, zero egress fees, and cryptographic verification artifacts (metadata commitments).
How Canopy Makes Alternatives Discoverable
Canopy changes this by normalizing what's typically incomparable:
Pricing normalization: Converts different billing units (GB/month, TB/year, usage tiers) into comparable total cost of ownership. Surfaces hidden costs like egress fees and API request charges that standard RFPs miss.
Exit optionality assessment: Estimates switching cost drivers (egress fees, contract exit terms) and flags portability risks. Code-change scope is validated during parity testing.
Example in practice: When an RFP lists "S3-compatible storage + SOC 2," Canopy makes egress, portability, and availability of independently checkable audit artifacts visible in the initial shortlist.
What Akave Brings to the Comparison
When Akave Cloud appears in Canopy's marketplace, enterprises see:
Economics: Flat-rate pricing ($14.99/TB/month), zero egress fees, zero per-request API charges (per Akave's published pricing).
Control: S3-compatible APIs for portability, self-hosted gateway option so enterprises can control the data plane and policy enforcement in their environment, geofenced deployments to support residency controls and enforcement policies.
Verification: Blockchain-recorded metadata supporting evidence of storage operations, and that configured residency policies were applied at write-time (plus audit recordkeeping workflows).
What We Mean by "Verifiable"
What's recorded: Hashed metadata commitments (e.g., timestamps, configuration/policy commitments) tied to storage operations.
Where it's recorded: Blockchain ledger (publicly verifiable). Records are metadata commitments, no plaintext customer data is exposed; blockchain entries contain hashes and operation commitments.
What can be independently checked: That storage operations occurred at specific times with specific configurations. Auditors can independently verify the records (directly or via exported evidence packages) without relying only on Akave-controlled logs.
Verification method: Technical documentation (Verification): docs.akave.xyz/
Why Canopy Exists
Teams use third-party platforms when comparing providers becomes too time-consuming or inconsistent across procurement cycles. Pricing units differ, benchmarks are hard to normalize, and contract terms hide practical switching costs.
Canopy supports procurement stages:
Define needs: Enterprises specify technical requirements (S3 compatibility, durability guarantees), compliance mandates (GDPR, SOC 2), and cost constraints.
Compare providers: Normalized metrics with actual numbers, not subjective descriptions.
Negotiate terms: Support negotiations for pricing, trials, and migration assistance.
Migration planning: Step-by-step guides for DNS cutover, S3 compatibility testing, and parallel-run validation.
Performance tracking: Post-migration dashboards monitoring actual cost, compliance status, and uptime.
The Technical Reality: S3 Compatibility and Migration Considerations
S3 parity verification: Test multipart uploads, presigned URLs, bucket policies, versioning. For workloads using standard S3 APIs, migration can often involve endpoint and credential changes rather than code rewrites. Edge cases around IAM semantics, lifecycle rules, and tooling integrations require testing.
Geofencing configuration: Define data residency requirements in code. The O3 gateway enforces rules during write operations, generating blockchain-recorded metadata supporting evidence that configured residency policies were applied at write-time.
Flat-rate cost modeling: $14.99/TB/month eliminates variable costs tied to retrieval volume or API request counts. Budget accurately without tracking usage patterns.
Audit artifact collection: Write operations produce blockchain-recorded metadata that supports audit evidence and recordkeeping workflows.
Deploy Your First Evaluation
Start with a non-production workload: development environment data, backup storage, or analytics datasets. Request a side-by-side comparison through Canopy's platform.
Track three evaluation criteria:
- Total cost (storage + retrieval + API operations)
- Migration complexity (endpoint configuration vs code changes)
- Verification artifact availability (what audit evidence is accessible)
Most teams complete initial evaluation in 30 days.
Request Akave Cloud comparison
Full technical documentation
FAQ
What does "verifiable storage" mean?
Verifiable storage means every storage operation generates a blockchain-recorded metadata commitment—including timestamps, configuration settings, and policy commitments. Auditors can independently verify these records without relying solely on provider-controlled logs. No plaintext customer data is exposed; blockchain entries contain only hashes and operation commitments.
How does Akave's verification differ from traditional cloud audit logs?
Traditional cloud providers maintain audit logs on their own infrastructure—logs that can theoretically be modified or deleted. Akave records metadata commitments to a public blockchain ledger, creating independently verifiable evidence that storage operations occurred at specific times with specific configurations. This shifts compliance from "trust our logs" to "verify the cryptographic proof."
How long does an Akave Cloud evaluation take through Canopy?
Most teams complete initial evaluation in 30 days. Start with a non-production workload (development data, backups, or analytics datasets), request a side-by-side comparison through Canopy, and track three criteria: total cost, migration complexity, and verification artifact availability.
What should I test when evaluating S3 compatibility?
Test multipart uploads, presigned URLs, bucket policies, and versioning. For workloads using standard S3 APIs, migration often involves endpoint and credential changes rather than code rewrites. Edge cases around IAM semantics, lifecycle rules, and specific tooling integrations require additional testing during evaluation.
Akave Cloud is an enterprise-grade, distributed and scalable object storage designed for large-scale datasets in AI, analytics, and enterprise pipelines. It offers S3 object compatibility, cryptographic verifiability, immutable audit trails, and SDKs for agentic agents; all with zero egress fees and no vendor lock-in saving up to 80% on storage costs vs. hyperscalers.
Akave Cloud works with a wide ecosystem of partners operating hundreds of petabytes of capacity, enabling deployments across multiple countries and powering sovereign data infrastructure. The stack is also pre-qualified with key enterprise apps such as Snowflake and others.