Storage in the public cloud generally offers lower costs and resources than an in-house storage infrastructure. But this option is not as ideal as cloud providers would have you believe. Knowing and understanding the real costs of storage is a headache...
Data is at the heart of digital transformation. Companies are using data to improve customer experience, win new markets, enhance employee performance and improve processes...
As a result, the volume of data continues to explode. According to IDC, data production will rise from 33 zettabytes in 2018 to 175 zettabytes (175 billion terabytes) in 2025.
Where to store? In-house or in the cloud?
Investment in hardware, ongoing operational costs, more or less frequent and easy-to-deploy updates, a maintenance team... In-house storage requires a substantial budget.
In order to reduce costs while increasing efficiency, more and more companies are migrating to the cloud. For CIOs and IT teams, this means reducing time-consuming, non-value-added tasks. The cloud enables them to concentrate on value-creating processes.
Storage was one of the first public cloud services to be chosen by businesses. And this trend is unlikely to slow down over the next few years. The business is expected to grow from $18.87 billion in 2015 to $65.41 billion next year, according to research firm MarketsandMarkets.
But getting to grips with cloud storage costs isn't easy. First of all, you can't estimate the real cost just by looking at promotional offers. Once you get to grips with the issue, you quickly realize that comparing prices between services requires method, willpower and patience.
30% of expenses out of control!
As in other fields (Internet Service Providers, for example), suppliers do nothing to simplify the situation: constantly changing price lists, discounts offered on a case-by-case basis, more or less abstruse technical terms...
The second factor blurring this analysis is shadow IT. According to estimates by analysts Gartner, around 30% of technology spending is carried out without the approval of the IT department.
As a result, companies have dozens, hundreds or even thousands of cloud accounts that are not factored into the real cost of outsourced storage. Worse still, they don't benefit from discounts based on the volume of storage and/or applications used.
Cost control therefore starts with identifying which of your company's applications and data are stored in the cloud (or running in SaaS mode). Vendor asset management tools (BMC, IBM, Microsoft, Qualys...) can be used to carry out this inventory, even when they have not been approved by the IT department or the IT team.
Third tip: to understand whether the cloud will be interesting from an "economic" point of view, it's important to examine the type of activity and use of your data, and identify the appropriate level of storage. Many companies have data scattered all over the place. As we have seen, this is due to shadow IT. But that's not all.
Data fragmentation
That's the downside of multicloud! Convinced by the benefits of the cloud, many organizations decide to migrate their data and applications to the platforms of different suppliers. The result is massive data fragmentation.
According to a Cohesity survey of 900 CIOs (in Australia, France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the USA), the majority of respondents recognize that their data is highly fragmented within and between public clouds. Worse still, they believe it could become almost impossible to manage in the long term.
And is it possible to have an exhaustive view of storage costs when there are too many suppliers? It's impossible, unless you call in companies specializing in this area. There's another negative impact:
But this growing proliferation of data, spread across a myriad of locations, infrastructure silos and management systems, is preventing companies from fully exploiting its value.
Public cloud environments offer agility, flexibility and interesting opportunities for accelerating testing and development. But it is absolutely essential that companies tackle the massive fragmentation of data (spread across multiple cloud platforms) if they are to realize the expected benefits of the cloud.
Given the amount of data that organizations accumulate on a daily basis, it's almost inevitable that, without proper management, organizations will lose control of their data and, in particular, the costs of storage...
