Veritas Warns companies face hefty bills from post-Covid data storage ramp-up

  • Lack of built-in options to archive data forces users to reach their storage limits
  • Businesses must act now to avoid potentially paying 22 times more than necessary

Veritas Technologies, a leader in multi-cloud data management, warns that enterprises are facing a cost crisis for collaborative work tools as post-COVID work practices begin to catch up.

The use of cloud collaboration services, such as Microsoft SharePoint (the storage and sharing platform used by Office 365 and Microsoft Teams), accelerated rapidly at the onset of the pandemic. Yet, with very few collaboration tool vendors offering options for archiving files, many companies are finding that their data volumes and cost overruns are now spiraling out of control. If left unaddressed, these companies will find themselves paying the high price of “excess storage” for data they no longer use and should have archived.

As businesses grapple with rising energy costs, supply chain issues, and labor shortages, a sudden spike in cloud storage costs is the last thing they need. Companies may anticipate the problem by adopting third-party solutions to automatically archive legacy data from cloud services, but few are aware of it.

Johnny Karam, Managing Director and Vice President of Emerging International Region at Veritas Technologies, explains: “Companies in the UAE and around the world have quickly adopted cloud-based collaboration and hybrid work tools during the pandemic to enable their employees to work productively. As a result, by the end of 2020, the number of SharePoint accounts soared to over 200 million globally. Today, much of the data created at the start of the pandemic would have been archived if stored on an organization’s own servers, but many cloud collaboration tools, including SharePoint, lack a native archiving function, and the data all piles up in ‘hot’ expensive storage. That means some companies are paying to keep every employee’s Teams chat from two years ago on the most expensive storage tier.

“Hot” storage refers to storage media that provide fast and easy access to data, usually based on high-end hardware with highly optimized connectivity. Its counterpart, cold storage, often 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 continue to work remotely effectively and efficiently. No company, big or small, would want to see costs keep them from continuing to use these collaboration tools. To protect against skyrocketing costs from the bloated amount of unarchived and unorganized data, businesses should consider using a third-party solution to move unused data to cold storage, while keeping it searchable and accessible. to the company.

Cloud data management tools, like Veritas’ NetBackup SaaS Protection, can simply move archive-ready data to more cost-effective storage tiers, often on the same cloud platform companies already use for their hot data. and without compromising privacy and data sovereignty. terms.

Johnny said, “We estimate that storage could be up to 22x cheaper for businesses that switch from paying for additional capacity in SharePoint to archiving their data to more affordable storage tiers*.

*Based on typical price of $153 (AED 561.97) per TB per month for SharePoint overage vs. quoted cost of $676 (AED 2482.94) for 100 TB Azure Storage reserved capacity over 3 years in a cool level.

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