Your CFO needs to account for $2M annual storage spend, and sign off on “more storage”
IT pulls capacity reports. Finance pulls old invoices, exports billing CSVs. Weeks of data collection, pivot tables and much pain later you have a $/TB for your data estate.
By the time the data is collated your picture is out of date. The problem has moved on. You pull the trigger on another infrastructure spend anyway.
Four Types of Storage
We consume storage in four categories, each with different economics. But here’s the problem: there’s no common language between them.
- Filesystem – NAS and storage appliances for active data. Capital Expenditure. Vendor-specific dashboards.
- Platforms – Dropbox, Box, OneDrive. SaaS subscription spend per user.
- Object – Public cloud ($5-$25/TB) or private (depreciating asset on your balance sheet). Different billing, same invisibility.
- Archive – Long-term retention. Cheap per TB, expensive to ignore, invisible until you need it.
The underlying technology or vendor doesn’t matter. There are four types.
Four commercial models. Impossible to see the true cost of data all at once
Building a picture is hard. Keeping it up to date is harder. Justifying the cost of your data at short notice is hardest.
Winning isn’t buying more, better or faster storage. It’s seeing the cost of data on the same scale.
Put the data about your data in one dashboard and waste becomes obvious.
What percentage of your storage spend is in the wrong place? Imagine utility bills arriving in different units, different schedules, for different departments. You’re spending money. You just don’t know where.