In the first quarter of 2026, 2.8 billion records leaked through misconfigured S3, Azure Blob and Google Cloud Storage buckets, and 73% of the exposed buckets belonged to organizations with a dedicated security team. The answer is not another dashboard — it is organization-level locks and infrastructure-as-code guardrails.

AWS S3 Standard charges $23/TB for storage and $90/TB for egress. Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, and MinIO offer the same S3 API at $7 to $15/TB — with free or near-free egress. Here’s which one to pick based on whether you’re doing backups, CDN, or data lakes.