Knowledge workers spend a quarter of each day looking for information. That’s over 2 hours every day lost to hunting through folders and asking colleagues where files live. You wouldn’t build a library without a catalog, but most companies just dump petabytes into shared storage with no functional search.
If the average salary in M&E is $75,000, a 50 person operation is throwing away $1m every year. Not on infrastructure costs or software licenses. Salaries being paid to people who can’t find the files they need to do their value creating work is waste.
Storage capacity gets debated in budget meetings. File findability doesn’t. Heads of department debate whether to buy another 100TB, but no onetalks about why nobody can find anything in the 500TB they already own. Enterprise search has a 10% first-attempt success rate compared to Google’s 95%. We live in a world where consumer-grade search outstrips any enterprise tool out there.
Imagine walking into a library where every book is on a shelf marked “Miscellaneous”. As a result, people do one of three things: #1 hoard their stuff somewhere only they know, #2 duplicate stuff because they don’t know what already exists, #3 develop unique conventions that mean different things to different people.
We measure capacity, performance, and protection. We ignore visibility. When storage spend climbs, it’s not just more data; it’s duplicate data we stored because we couldn’t find the original. Companies don’t need monolithic data management systems, just a sensible way to keep a track of everything that’s created, duplicated and squirrelled away by users and their different ways of working.
Companies that crack this save search time, eliminate duplicate projects, reduce wasted storage, and the elusive dark data that actually has value within. ROI isn’t a theoretical number, it’s a tangible difference between paying people to search and paying them to work.
What if your next storage spend wasn’t about capacity at all, but about making existing capacity actually usable?