The Hidden Costs of Storing What You Don’t Need

Enterprises, regardless of the industry, struggle with the management of data. Because of the lack of knowledge, proper strategy, and custom solutions, enterprises store a substantial amount of data that they don’t need and pay many hidden costs. Yes, there is a surprising amount of waste lurking in IT environments today; it means there is an opportunity for significant savings by incorporating an intelligent data strategy. Hidden costs associated with data storage continue to mount up over time. Therefore, it becomes important to understand the hidden costs of storing what you don’t need. 

Understanding the Importance of The Hidden Costs of Data Storage

‘Worldwide IT spending is expected to total $5.61 trillion in 2025, an increase of 9.8% from 2024’- Gartner, Inc., January 21, 2025. These values contain an exorbitant amount of waste. 90% of stored data becomes unused just after three months. Digital waste impacts businesses significantly financially and in terms of productivity. ‘Only 32% of data available to enterprises is used while the remaining 68% goes unleveraged’- Seagate Technology Report. Should you pay to store data that you don’t need? Understanding the factors affecting data storage costs and the costs involved in data storage may help you frame a strategy to minimize data storage expenses.            

The Factors That Affect Data Storage Costs

Data storage costs vary significantly based on whether data is stored in a cloud environment, on-premises, or using a hybrid model. The number of factors that influence data storage costs- 

• Storage Media: SSDs are faster but more expensive than HDDs.
• Volume of Data: Larger datasets require more storage space, increasing costs.
• Data Retention: Longer retention policies lead to higher costs.
• Security: Implementing robust security measures increases overall storage cost.
• Accessibility: Frequent access to data incurs additional charges, especially in cloud services.

Understanding The Costs Involved in Data Storage

Storage is only a portion. The hardware, software, and IT hours required to protect, share, and manage the stored data should also be accounted for. The major costs involved in data storage that you don’t need include- 

• Data Integration: Data integration is a hidden cost associated with data storage because it is time-consuming and complex.
• Backing Up and Securing Data: Data backup and security solutions are expensive, and these are often not included in the initial price quotes for data storage solutions.
• Monthly Bandwidth Usage: The more information you store in the data storage system, monthly bandwidth consumption increases. 
• Dropbox Costs:  Like many cloud storage providers, Dropbox requires you to purchase storage space to store your data. You need more space on Dropbox to sync your files across devices. Also, you may need to upgrade to a Dropbox Pro account.
• Annual Fees for Hardware Maintenance: Annual fees for hardware maintenance, typically related to the upkeep of your computer's hardware or software, increase the hidden costs associated with data storage. 
• Hardware Fees: Inefficient and unorganised storage systems require expensive hardware solutions and hefty maintenance fees. Employees waste precious hours navigating tangled folders, while critical processes grind to a halt because of slow access.
• Wasted Storage Space: Duplicate files, unstructured data, and obsolete records bloat your storage with dead weight.
• Operational Inefficiency: Retrieving information from a disorganized data storage is just like finding a needle in a haystack. It puts silos in business operations driving poor user experience. 

How To Build an Intelligent Strategy to Reduce Data Storage Costs

Effective data cost reduction techniques involve streamlining data processing, implementing data governance policies, and optimizing storage. By employing data compression, identifying redundant data, and archiving less-used information, businesses can significantly lower their storage costs. Building an intelligent strategy to reduce data storage costs requires you to consider- 

• Implementing data deduplication eliminates redundant copies and reduces storage needs.
• Integrating tiered storage solutions, placing less-used data on cheaper and slower storage.
• Utilizing data compression techniques to decrease the size of data sets and required storage space.
• Implementing auto-scaling for cloud resources to ensure you pay only for the computing power you use.
• Optimized power management is a cornerstone of sustainable data storage. By managing power allocation intelligently, businesses can significantly reduce energy consumption during low activity periods.
• Strictly using data governance frameworks to avoid unnecessary data proliferation and maintain data quality
• Assessing current data storage and identifying redundant or obsolete data for removal reduces the storage costs significantly. 
• Data compression techniques minimize storage space requirements.
• Using cloud services with pay-as-you-go models optimizes data storage expenditure.

Solutions to Control the Costs of Storing the Data

Neglecting to optimize data costs can lead to inflated expenses, inefficient resource allocation, and financial waste due to misaligned storage solutions and unnecessary data retention. Is reducing data storage costs possible? Yes. There are many effective ways to control the costs of storing the data. 

• Take an inventory of data. Generate an inventory of data. Examine data access and determine its importance. Collect data access information, identify data types, and identify access patterns. 
• Prioritize data: Data prioritization is categorizing and assigning importance levels to different types of data based on criticality and sensitivity. Define priority levels and assign labels at the row, column, or file level. 
• Optimize data lifecycle management. Stages of the data lifecycle include data creation, usage, storage, sharing, retention, and disposal. Data storage has three critical cost components: Storage cost, transaction cost, and latency cost. Use automation to optimize data retention policies.
• Minimize data transfer. Minimizing data transfer reduces data movement across networks, decreasing data transfer costs.
• Optimize data volume: Decrease the amount of data that you store. capture less data, compress data, delete unneeded data, deduplicate data, and optimize user behavior. 
• Compress the backup files. Enable compression of backup data to reduce the storage requirements. Compressed backups need less storage space, reducing data storage costs. Analyze the backup frequency for different data types and adjust the backup schedule based on the importance and frequency of data changes. 
• Optimize file formats. File formats influence data storage costs. Optimize input/output (I/O) patterns and query patterns of your data.
• Optimize storage solutions. Select the most appropriate data storage method. You may do it by adding caching mechanisms, switching databases, or using different storage types.
• Move from infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to platform as a service (PaaS). PaaS solutions are more cost-effective and efficient than IaaS solutions for volumetric data storage. 

Monitoring and keeping the hidden costs of data storage is a consistent process. Cost-effective data storage is getting more complex with increasing requirements for volumetric data storage, but it is manageable by partnering with specialists like RITC Cybersecurity, a leading cybersecurity firm, has years’ experience in providing custom solutions meeting diverse requirements of businesses; for data storage and security, penetration testing, cyber risk assessment, developing internal and external enterprise change management processes, or compliance audit preparation. Wouldn’t you like to have optimized data storage at minimum cost to avoid unnecessary costs you might be paying? Book your free appraisal online with data security and management experts or call 480-708-7013.