Have you ever had that feeling when you check your bank statement and notice that you’re paying for Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video along with your cable subscription for linear TV? This meandering metaphor is going to take you on a journey about how companies can reduce storage costs
Each subscription seems reasonable when you signed up for it. Nothing outrageous, a reasonable monthly fee. But suddenly you’re spending £100’s per month on streaming services, and reverting to watching the same rotation of shows on Netflix when you can’t be bothered.
Welcome to enterprise storage costs.
The Streaming Service Problem (But With Petabytes)
Here’s how runaway storage costs happen in organisations…
IT buys a NetApp array, which makes perfect sense. It has enterprise-grade features, a reliable reputation, and easy to manage. £50K annual maintenance? Totally worth it to sleep well at night.
But Marketing needs something more user-friendly, so they go for Box. £15 per user per month. Justifiable for collaboration features.
Now development needs some object storage. AWS S3 gets added into the mix. Consumption based pricing, so can sneak it in to their department OpEx.
R&D on the other hand has a specific performance requirement. So they get a Dell PowerScale. A bit CapEx investment, but necessary to support their efforts.
Engineering spin up Azure Blob storage for a prototype that’s now in production.
Sales adopt Dropbox.
The list goes on.
Each of these decisions makes perfect sense in isolation. Each platform is justifiable. But no one person has visibility on the total monthly bill for storage or data..
Except the CFO
Who at some point will ask the same question they ask about every cost centre: “Can we reduce this?”
The Cost Breakdown Nobody Can Give You
Let’s play this scene forward. The CFO walks in and asks: “What are we actually spending on storage?”
The answer they’ll get from most organisations?
“Well… it’s complicated.”
You’ve got:
- CapEx investments – A NetApp array purchased three years ago, now depreciated but still consuming resources in the data centre
- OpEx subscriptions – Monthly fees for cloud storage that started small but grew over time
- SaaS platform costs – Per-user licensing that was reasonable at the time until you multiply it by hundreds of users
- Hidden cloud costs – Storage fees are just the start; throw in egress, API calls and retrieval fees for archived data and it gets interesting
- Maintenance and support – Annual contracts that auto-renew and somehow keep going up
Most finance departments see these as separate line items, buried in different department budgets and categories. The lack of visibility is where the costs go unmanaged.
It’s like trying to reduce your streaming costs by negotiating with Netflix but ignoring the other six services you’re paying for. A £2 per month saving doesn’t offset the rest of the cash you’re bleeding.
The “Just Cancel Everything” Trap
The simple answer would be to consolidate. Pick one vendor, one platform and one cloud, migrate everything and you’re done
But it’s not.
This is the equivalent of canning all your other streaming services except for Netflix because “everything’s on Netflix anyway.”
But then you remember your partner watches a show only available on Apple TV+, the kids love Disney+, and there’s an exclusive documentary on Paramount+ that you can’t wlive without.
“Just use Netflix” doesn’t work for your household’s needs.
And storage platforms are the same.
Your NetApp array isn’t just storage. It’s part of backup systems, disaster recovery workflows, and a decade of operational muscle memory. Each cloud storage bucket is supporting one or more globally distributed teams who need instant access to their data from anywhere.
Consolidating to a single platform means either fitting round pegs into square holes or creating so many exceptions to the policy that the whole exercise becomes pointless.
And don’t forget that migrating petabytes of data across platforms is expensive. Remember our earlier discussion about what a petabyte looks like? Now imagine actually moving it, with all the data transfer fees, downtime, and migration costs that are involved.
“Consolidation” often costs more than the problem it’s meant to solve.
The Audit Nobody Wants to Do (But Everyone Needs)
Here’s how to actually reduce storage costs: understand what you’re paying for and whether you’re using it.
Think about how you might audit your streaming subscriptions:
- Make a list. Every service, every cost, every user. Build a picture.
- Check your usage. Ask when you last logged into that niche sports streaming service? Are you getting value from the cost?
- Then, you optimise. Cancel unused services. Downgrade from premium to standard where it makes sense. Keep only what you really use.
Reducing storage costs works exactly the same.
Step One: See Everything You’re Paying For
First your need complete visibility across your storage estate. Not just the IT-sanctioned platforms, but everything that consumes budget:
- All on-premises storage (NAS, SAN, storage arrays)
- All cloud storage (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)
- All SaaS platforms (Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, SharePoint)
- All the “shadow IT” storage that departments adopted without asking
Until you have acomplete picture, you’re just guessing about where the costs actually are.
Step Two: Understand What You’re Actually Using
This is where things gets interesting. Unlike streaming services where you either watch or don’t, storage has layers of usage:
Active data – Accessed daily, supports current projects, needs premium storage. This is your Netflix – you use it constantly, it justifies the cost.
Aging data – Accessed occasionally, important but not critical. Could live on cheaper storage without impacting operations. This is the streaming service you use monthly – worth keeping, not worth premium pricing.
Cold data – Rarely accessed, kept for compliance or “just in case.” Consuming expensive storage but providing minimal active value. This is the service you forgot you subscribed to.
ROT data – Redundant, Obsolete, Trivial stuff. Literally paying to store digital garbage. This is a free trial you forgot to cancel that’s now charging you £12.99 monthly for something you used once.
Most organisations discover that 20-40% of their storage costs are spent on aging, cold, or ROT data that could potentially live somewhere much cheaper.
Step Three: Right-Size Everything
Once you know what you have and how it’s used, the next step becomes obvious:
Move cold data to cheaper tiers. Three year old project data doesn’t need to live on a premium NAS array. Archive storage costs a fraction of the price.
Eliminate ROT data. Duplicates, obsolete files, temporary data that became permanent needs to be deleted or archived properly.
Optimise cloud storage classes. AWS S3 Standard costs ~£0.023 per GB monthly. S3 Glacier Deep Archive? £0.00099 per GB monthly. That’s a 95% reduction for data you access quarterly at best.
Consolidate where it makes sense. Doesn’t have to be everything, or going all-in with a single vendor. But with a clean house you can really start to shop around.
This is just like keeping Netflix and Disney+ (high usage, justified cost) but canceling the other three services you never watch.
The YouTube Realisation
Here’s where our streaming analogy gets interesting.
You know what’s funny about all those streaming platforms? They all put their content on YouTube.
Trailers. Behind-the-scenes clips. Interviews with creators. Promotional content designed to drive you to their paid platforms.
YouTube is the universal interface. One place to preview content from everywhere. (and by the way the second largest search engine, according to the guys at the first largest search engine)
Storage needs the same thing.
You don’t need to force all of your data into one storage platform (the “just use Netflix” approach). You need a universal interface that lets you see, understand, and manage data across all of your platforms from one place.
A data management layer that sits above your storage infrastructure, that gives you:
- Complete visibility across every storage platform. (Just like YouTube shows content from every streaming service)
- Cost transparency showing exactly what you’re paying and why
- Usage intelligence revealing which data is hot, which is cold, which is forgotten
- Movement capabilities the ability to shift data between platforms based on business logic, not vendor lock-in
What about the underlying storage platforms? They’re still there, doing what they do best. You just manage them intelligently rather than subscribing blindly.
The Financial Reality Check
Let’s talk real world numbers for a moment.
A typical enterprise might be storing 500TB across multiple platforms. That consists of:
- £150K annually on on-premises storage (hardware, maintenance, power, cooling)
- £80K annually on cloud storage and associated fees
- £60K annually on SaaS platform subscriptions
- £40K annually on various backup and archive solutions
That’s £330K in storage costs. Every year.
Research shows that proper data management reduces storage costs by 20-40%. We’ll be conservative and say 25%.
So £82,500 in annual savings.
Not by replacing platforms or forcing consolidation, but just by using what you already have more intelligently.
By moving cold data to appropriate tiers, eliminating ROT data and understanding which platforms you actually need.
What You Actually Need
Reducing storage costs isn’t about canceling everything and going all in with one vendor. It’s about managing what you have intelligently.
You need visibility across every platform. Not five separate dashboards, each showing their own slice of reality. A unified view of your complete data estate.
You need cost intelligence. What does each platform cost? What’s each department consuming? Which data placement decisions are expensive or economical?
You need freedom to optimise. Move data between platforms based on business value, not vendor preferences. Using each platform for what it’s good at.
You need forecasting capabilities. What happens to costs if you implement tiering policies? What would the TCO of different storage strategies be? Model it before committing to doing it.
Organisations who are winning at storage cost management in 2025 aren’t the ones who picked the “right” storage platform. They’re the ones who treat their data platforms as a portfolio to be managed rather than a collection of subscriptions to be tolerated.
The Bottom Line
Remember that feeling when you looked at your streaming subscription total?
Now imagine someone showed you a dashboard that broke down every service, every cost and every hour of content watched. Then they gave you the ability to cancel unused services, downgrade unnecessary premium tiers, and only keep what you actively use all from one interface.
That’s what a proper unstructured data management platform does for storage costs.
Storage vendors will keep selling you more capacity. Cloud providers will happily scale your subscriptions up. Your SaaS platforms will decrease their per-user fees if you commit to bring more users to their platforms.
But none of them will help you understand whether you’re actually using what you are already paying for effectively.
Choose an unstructured data management platform that’s agnostic to where your data lives, gives you complete visibility across every storage subscription, and enables you to optimise based on business value rather than vendor convenience.
Don’t add another streaming service to add to the pile. Find your Youtube. A platform that shows you what you’re actually paying for and lets you make intelligent choices about what to keep.
Because in 2025, reducing storage costs isn’t about buying cheaper storage. It’s about managing what you have like someone who checks their bank statements and makes informed decisions.
Rather than someone who keeps paying for six streaming services while watching the same three shows on Netflix.