How much do you spend on data storage? Data storage costs probably take a big chunk of your IT budget, especially data stored in the cloud.
Let’s take Google Cloud, for example, which, at $0.026/GB/month (at time of writing), is one of the more affordable data storage solutions. Storing 60 TB of data will set you back $1,597.44 every month. And that’s before you add processing and bandwidth fees.
Nowadays, organizations generate a mindboggling amount of data. While only a minuscule amount of that data is ever stored, it’s easy to see how data storage costs can quickly start to add up.
Do you feel like you’re paying too much for data storage? Do something about it. Follow these five simple tips to cut storage costs without compromising your data estate.
While redundancy is key to maintaining data availability, it can be wasteful. To be clear, we’re not talking about backups. Redundant data, in this case, refers to duplicate copies of the original data. There’s no need to keep multiple copies of the same data if you already have a reliable backup—they just take up valuable storage space.
Get rid of all abandoned data too. This is data that’s no longer useful in your business and no longer needs to be retained.
The file types and formats you store can have a huge impact on storage costs. This is especially true for files and data sets with lots of redundant data (e.g. tabular data, audio, images and video). Take advantage of file compression tools that provide optimal compression ratios for storage and without impacting compute performance.
Not all data is created equal. Some sets of data may be more valuable or sensitive than others. Also, some data sets are accessed, manipulated, or used more frequently than others. So it doesn’t make sense to store all your data in one place.
Tired storage lets you optimize storage facilities and costs depending on the various classes of data. For instance, keep your frequently accessed data in the more expensive quick-access storage while archival data resides in slower, low-cost storage.
There’s often a need to keep multiple versions of data in order to track changes throughout its life cycle. That’s all well and good, but the traditional way of data versioning by storing each version separately is extremely storage-intensive. Managing countless versions of the same data is not cheap either.
Fortunately, we have less costly ways to version data nowadays. Powerful version control tools, such as lakeFS and Git LFS, and filesystems with snapshot functionality, such as ZFS, enable data versioning by storing only the changes between versions. This way, you can still track changes on any data, even on large files, without incurring unnecessary extra storage costs.
Did you know that the average cost of a data breach is nearly $5 million? Such a financial loss would be a huge blow to your business. Losing data through other mishaps, such as accidental deletion, hardware/software failure, or natural disaster, would be devastating too.
Minimize the risk of such financial losses in the following ways:
With the ever-growing proliferation of data, you simply can’t afford to ignore storage costs. Storage space has become such a valuable resource that every byte counts. So take practical measures to optimize your data storage for cost savings, efficiency, and security.
Develop a cost-efficient data storage strategy with Highway 99 Technology Solutions. We’ll help you get the most out of the latest data storage solutions.
Let’s get started with a free consultation.