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Data Storage Costs

Data storage costs are the expenses associated with storing and maintaining data in various forms of storage media, such as hard drives, solid-state drives (SSDs), cloud storage, and tape storage. These costs can be influenced by a variety of factors, including the size of the data, the type of storage media used, the frequency of data access, and the level of redundancy required. As the amount of unstructured data generated continues to grow, the cost of storing it remains a significant consideration for many organizations. In fact, according to the Komprise 2023 State of Unstructured Data Management Report, the majority of enterprise IT organizations are spending over 30% of their budget on data storage, backups and disaster recovery. This is why shifting from storage management to storage-agnostic data management continues to be a topic of conversation for enterprise IT leaders.

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Cloud Data Storage Costs

Cloud data storage costs refer to the expenses incurred for storing data on cloud storage platforms provided by companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). In addition to the points above about data storage costs (amount of data stored and frequency of data access) in the cloud the level of durability and availability required are also factors when it comes to cloud storage costs. Cloud data storage providers typically charge based on the amount of data stored per unit of time, and additional fees may be incurred for data retrieval, data transfer, and data processing. Many cloud storage providers offer different storage tiers with varying levels of performance and cost, allowing customers to choose the option that best fits their budget and performance needs. With the right cloud data management strategy, cloud storage can be more cost-effective than traditional hardware-centric on-premises storage, especially for organizations with large amounts of data and high storage needs.

Managing Data Storage Costs

Managing data storage costs involves making informed decisions (and the right investment strategies) about how to store, access, and use data in a cost-effective manner. Here are some strategies for managing data storage costs:

  • Data archiving: Archiving infrequently accessed data to lower cost storage options, such as object storage or tape, can help reduce storage costs.
  • Data tiering: Using different storage tiers for different types of data based on their access frequency and importance can help optimize costs.
  • Compression and deduplication: A well known data storage technique, compressing data and deduplicating redundant data can help reduce the amount of storage needed and lower costs.
  • Cloud file storage: Using cloud storage can be more cost-effective than traditional on-premises storage, especially for organizations with large amounts of data and high storage needs.
  • Data lifecycle management (aka Information Lifecycle Management): Regularly reviewing and purging unneeded data can help control storage costs over time.
  • Cost monitoring and optimization (see cloud cost optimization): Regularly monitoring and analyzing data storage costs and usage patterns can help identify opportunities for cost optimization.

By using a combination of these strategies, organizations can effectively manage their data storage costs and ensure that they are using their data storage resources efficiently. Additionally, organizations can negotiate with data storage providers to secure better pricing and take advantage of cost-saving opportunities like bulk purchasing or long-term contracts.

Stop Overspending on Data Storage with Komprise

The blog post How Storage Teams Use Komprise Deep Analytics summarizes a number of strategies storage teams use Komprise Intelligent Data Management to deliver greater data storage cost savings and unstructured data value to the business, including:

  • Business unit metrics with interactive dashboards
  • Business-unit data tiering, retention and deletion
  • Identifying and deleting duplicates
  • Mobilizing specific data sets for third-party tools
  • Using data tags from on-premises sources in the cloud

In the blog post Quantifying the Business Value of Komprise Intelligent Data Management, we review a storage cost savings analysis that saves customers an average 57% of overall data storage costs and over $2.6M+ annually. In addition to cost savings, benefits include:

Plan Future Data Storage Purchases with Visibility and Insight

With an analytics-first approach, Komprise delivers visibility into how data is growing and being used across a customer’s data storage silos – on-premises and in the cloud. Data storage administrators no longer have to make critical storage capacity planning decisions in the dark and now can understand how much more storage will be needed, when and how to streamline purchases during planning.

Optimize Data Storage, Backup, and DR Footprint

Komprise reduces the amount of data stored on Tier 1 NAS, as well as the amount of actively managed data—so customers can shrink backups, reduce backup licensing costs, and reduce DR costs.

Faster Cloud Data Migrations

Auto parallelize at every level to maximize performance, minimize network usage to migrate efficiently over WANs, and migrate more than 25 times faster than generic tools across heterogeneous cloud and storage with Elastic Data Migration.

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Reduced Datacenter Footprint

Komprise moves and copies data to secondary storage to help reduce on-premises data center costs, based on customizable data management policies.

Risk Mitigation

Since Komprise works across storage vendors and technologies to provide native access without lock-in, organizations reduce the risk of reliance on any one storage vendor.

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