Data storage often represents a significant cost for a business or public organisation. Discover a few tips to reduce your expenses related to data hosting.
1. Passer d’un stockage interne à un stockage en ligne
If you wish to limit your data storage expenditure, you should avoid opting for local hosting: it is indeed the most costly method. This involves the purchase of physical servers, as well as the installation and configuration of these servers (either by an in-house IT team or by a service provider).
The same applies to server maintenance and infrastructure management over time. All of these costs represent a significant burden for the organisation.
Conversely, online data storage and object storage make it possible to minimise the initial investment.
As data hosting, maintenance, and management are handled by the provider, there is no hardware to purchase and no IT recruitment required.
2. Prioritise a public cloud for storing your data
Any company considering storing its data in the cloud has two options for online storage: public cloud or private cloud.
In a private cloud, the infrastructure is entirely dedicated to the company, which retains full control over it.
Conversely, a public cloud shares server usage among different companies.
In the context of private cloud, the provider dedicates a server exclusively to their client at a fixed price.
Private cloud therefore costs more than public cloud, where data storage costs are shared among the various customers using the server.
3. Opt for pay-as-you-go pricing to avoid over-provisioning
Local data storage is done on servers: these offer storage capacity that is used progressively by the company.
When the server reaches capacity, the company must then reinvest in new storage space.
Some cloud providers adopt the same principle and offer, for example, organisations the option to rent a minimum storage capacity of 3 TB per user.
Many also offer "unlimited storage" plans. Care should therefore be taken not to opt for an online storage capacity that exceeds your actual needs.
It is advisable to regularly assess your storage usage in order to align your consumption with your actual needs and avoid over-provisioning.
Certain data storage methods offer pay-as-you-go pricing. Storage fees then adapt to the organisation's actual consumption.
4. Adopt a data lifecycle management policy
Beyond technical considerations, it is important to define a data lifecycle management policy in order to determine which data must absolutely be retained, and which can be archived or deleted based on its age or usage.
Retaining all your data can come at a very significant cost. Deleting obsolete and unnecessary data reduces the volume of data to be stored and therefore reduces your costs.
5. Choose the right provider for your object storage
While the rates offered by object storage providers are lower than those of on-premises storage and cloud storage, it is advisable to carefully compare the pricing of different solutions: there can be very significant differences. At ST DIGITAL, we thus offer a cost four times lower than that charged by the major storage providers.
6. Thoroughly understand pricing proposals
There are significant pricing differences between providers of online and offline storage solutions.
To compare storage costs, you can rely on two indicators.
- First, it is important to compare the cost per user of solutions for a given amount of storage (e.g. 1 TB).
This will enable you to quickly identify solutions that match your budget and workforce size.
- The second indicator to analyse is the total cost of ownership, which is used to assess the overall budget for purchasing and operating an asset.
Applied to data storage, this therefore includes both the purchase or rental of servers, maintenance costs, expenses related to power supply and cooling, backup and data recovery costs, etc.
Many providers charge costs in addition to storage fees, including infrastructure management fees, as well as transfer or egress fees if you wish to move your data to another environment or delete it. These additional costs can be very high and significantly increase the total cost of ownership.
- Another factor to consider when choosing a provider is its geographical proximity to your organisation.
First, using a foreign storage solution sometimes involves paying in a foreign currency subject to exchange rate fluctuations.
Furthermore, using a data centre located in Africa helps reduce the amount of bandwidth required to transfer data, which in turn reduces costs.
ST DIGITAL supports you with the ideal cloud solution to reduce your data storage costs
As a local storage solution, we host our clients' data in three data centres located in Africa (Cameroun, Cote d'ivoire and Togo).
Combined with our public cloud solution, this geographical proximity enables us to offer our clients an extremely competitive cost per user.
Would you like to discuss your data storage expenditure?
Our team is available to advise you