Post-covid surge in data storage leads to hefty bills for firms

Veritas Technologies, a provider of multi-cloud data management, warns that businesses are facing a collaborative working tool cost crisis as post-COVID working practices catch up with them.

At the start of the pandemic, the use of cloud collaboration services such as Microsoft SharePoint (the storage and sharing platform used by Office 365 and Microsoft Teams) increased dramatically. However, with very few collaboration tool providers offering options to archive files, many businesses are discovering that their data volumes and cost overruns are now spiraling out of control. If left unaddressed, those businesses will face the high cost of’storage overages’ for data that they no longer need and should have archived.

Businesses are already dealing with rising energy costs, supply chain issues, and labor shortages, so an unexpected increase in cloud storage costs is the last thing they need. Businesses can avoid this problem by implementing third-party solutions that automatically archive legacy data from cloud services, but few are aware of this.

Johnny Karam, Managing Director & Vice President of International Emerging Region at Veritas Technologies, explains: “Businesses in the UAE and around the world quickly embraced hybrid working and cloud collaboration tools during the pandemic to keep their employees working productively. As a result, by the end of 2020, the number of SharePoint accounts shot up to over 200 million globally. Today, much of the data created at the outbreak of the pandemic would have been archived if it were stored on an organisation’s own servers, however many cloud collaboration tools, including SharePoint, lack a native archive function, and the data is all stacking up in ‘hot’ expensive storage. This means that some companies are paying to keep every Teams chat from every employee from two years ago on the most expensive tier of storage.”

‘Hot’ storage refers to storage media that provides quick and easy data access, typically based on premium hardware with highly optimized connectivity. Cold storage, on the other hand, frequently uses less expensive media that allows data to be stored for compliance purposes, where it is typically kept online or offline and rarely accessed.

Johnny Karam continues: “Collaboration solutions, like SharePoint and Teams, have helped businesses in the UAE to continue remote working effectively and efficiently. No business, small or large, would want to see costs prevent them from continuing to use these collaboration tools. In order to safeguard themselves against soaring costs due to and inflated amount of unarchived, and unorganised data, businesses must consider using a third-party solution to move unused data to cold storage, whilst keeping it searchable and accessible to the business.”

Cloud data management tools, such as Veritas’ NetBackup SaaS Protection, can simply move archive-ready data to more cost-effective storage tiers, often on the same cloud platform that businesses are already using for their hot data, without jeopardizing data privacy and sovereignty.

Johnny said, “We estimate that storage could be as much as 22 times cheaper for businesses that move from paying for extra capacity in SharePoint, to archiving their data to more affordable storage tiers.”