Don't Forget About Storage Costs

I can't tell you the number of times I've been in a meeting where the issue of storage costs comes up. What always surprises me is the laissez-faire attitude toward storage costs..."Storage is cheap and getting cheaper" some businessperson will say. And, for the most part, everyone else just nods their heads.

It's the easy way to dodge a tough issue. Who wants to argue with the truth; in fact, the per GB cost of storage is decreasing and will continue to do so. But, what no one talks about is that the amount of information being created that needs to be stored is growing exponentially, and probably at a larger clip than the decrease in storage costs.

Thus, in relative terms, the cost of storing information continues to be the same, if not more, despite lower storage costs - especially for all those organizations still sadly stuck in the "retain everything" mode.

Talk to your infrastructure and operations professionals...these folks know that it costs big money to store all an organization's information assets. These are the folks that roll their eyes when they hear everyone else talk about how cheap storage is getting.

And, these are the folks that must bend over backwards when that discovery request comes in and forces them to restore the cheap backup tapes (at close to $2,500 per tape), or gather the 100 GB of information off cheap storage (which then has to be processed at a cost of about $2,000 per GB). For these professionals, the cost of cheap storage comes in lost man-hours; for their organizations, the cost of cheap storage is born in too expensive eDiscovery.

I won't argue that storage, in general, is being commoditized. But, that doesn't mean we can just shrug off the cost. Because we continue to create more and more information, that relative cost of storage stays the same or rises.

The solution lies in creating policies that allow for the disposition of information and putting in place an infrastructure that allows an organizations to put the information it keeps on the cheapest storage possible, get rid of what it doesn't need, and have the tools in place to conduct efficient eDiscovery.

Sarah Howard writes for Mimosa Systems about information management solutions that unify email archiving, data protection and disaster recovery in one solution. Mimosa Systems provides email archiving, ediscovery, data recovery, data storage, and document management for the new generation of critical enterprise information.