As the cloud storage industry continues to evolve, pricing is no longer as straightforward as “how much data are you storing in the cloud?” Nowadays, there are layers upon layers of fees and charges you need to keep tabs on, including egress fees. Things can get even more confusing if your business is using multiple cloud storage providers, each with its own different policies. It’s in our very nature to reduce costs when possible, but more importantly, you may be paying for a service you’re not even using. Fortunately, as the cloud market continues to mature and evolve, there are managed service providers (MSPs) that can assist in helping maintain your cloud infrastructure to lower your monthly fees. If you’re interested in saving on cloud storage, fill out this form to receive bids from MSPs for free. Even if your business has already migrated to the cloud, you may be surprised by how much money you can save on storage alone.
Below, you’ll find some other useful tips that can help you manage your cloud storage costs. Sometimes, there are low-effort actions you and your organization can take to save money.
1. Determine your storage requirements
Is your business having to store gigabytes, terabytes, or petabytes of data in the cloud? You may be surprised by what some providers can offer if you’re not storing a huge amount of data. It may seem like common sense to advise shopping around, but we can’t stress how important that is when it comes to cloud storage. Don’t forget, once you sign onto a cloud storage provider, it can be very difficult (and costly!) to migrate your data to a different provider later on down the road. Determine just how much storage you’re planning to use in the immediate future and get quotes from multiple sources. Remember to also determine network egress fees for each company.
2. Select performance tiers based on your needs
It’s likely that not every byte of data you’re storing in the cloud needs to accessed all the time. Monitor the read/write access for your data and downgrade to a cheaper performance tier if it makes sense for that volume of data. Avoid the “set it and forget it” mentality for your cloud storage and monitor usage to find ways to save money.
3. Be mindful of egress fees
If you’ve never heard of egress fees, you can learn more about them in a previous post. Essentially, most providers will charge a fee if you need to move data out of the cloud and these fees can add up to be a substantial amount if you’re not wary of them. Egress fees are especially painful for companies that never included them in a budget and end up shocked when the bill arrives at the end of the month. Educate your employees and introduce best practices for data access and egress.
4. Deduplicate data before moving to the cloud
It doesn’t matter what policies you have in place for duplicated data, it’s bound to happen at any company. Prior to moving your data to the cloud, it’s a good idea to get rid of duplicates so you’re not paying to store redundant data. The process of deduplication analyzes your data, identifies duplicates, and replaces them with a reference to the stored location. This should help reduce storage costs when moving to the cloud.
5. Does it really need to be stored in the cloud?
A common mistake made by companies is storing everything imaginable in the cloud. Some managers see the low per-gigabyte cost and default to backing up every byte of data possible. Take the time to sort through your data and determine what actually needs to be stored in the cloud and if you’re on a tight budget, make sure it’s only data that’s crucial to operating the business. Remember those videos and photos taken during Sam’s birthday celebration? Yeah, those probably won’t need to be in the cloud. Sorry Sam.
One of the easiest ways to save money on cloud storage is to fill out this form and receive multiple bids from MSPs for your business. It’ll take less than a minute to submit and you get to choose when to respond.