4 Strategies for Cloud Storage Optimisation 

Save budget and manage risk with these cloud storage optimisation strategies

When the pandemic began, solutions like Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint became a lifeline for employees, making it easier than ever to communicate and collaborate, no matter where they were. But it quickly became apparent that these tools also produced an unprecedented amount of data.

Businesses now find themselves facing significantly higher data storage costs—and even costly overage fees. In fact, a 2021 report found that more than one-third of companies have cloud service budget overruns of up to 40 percent.

And it’s not just storage costs that are on the rise – so is your risk. Holding on to too much information can increase your chance of facing regulatory risks, like difficulties staying compliant with regulations; process risks, which could cause challenges in finding what you need; and security risks, such as malicious actors or system failures.

While storage budgets will likely never return to pre-pandemic levels, you can mitigate your data volume and manage your risks by proactively applying robust data governance and information lifecycle principles—and we’re here to show you how.  

In this eBook, you’ll learn about the value of storage optimisation and get the four key strategies that help to optimise your storage costs, protect against surprise overages, and safeguard your organisation against legal and reputational risk.

Table of Contents

• Introduction

• Why is Storage Optimisation Important

• Good Riddance to ROT

• Lifecycle Management

• Defensible Destruction

• Backup Content to Remove Inactive Accounts

• Conclusion

Drive productivity, reduce risk, and improve speed

It’s very easy for an environment to get bloated by redundant, obsolete, or trivial (“ROT”) content, which can cause intense frustration for users struggling to find up-to-date information. A recent survey sponsored by Citrix found that employees spend 25% of their time searching for information they need to do their jobs. By getting rid of this stale content, organisations can drive productivity, reduce risk, and improve the speed and accuracy of search, analytics, and e-discovery solutions. (pg. 2)

Work smarter, not harder

By discovering, mapping, and classifying unstructured data, organisations can make more informed decisions regarding which data to keep and which to remove. You can utilise available tools—some are even free—to help you identify this data in a very systematic way. (pg. 3)

Importance of lifecycle management

As Teams adoption continues to grow, organisations that permit self-service provisioning will see more and more Teams being created. Without proper employee training and education, these workspaces can multiply exponentially, leading to data sprawl. Unfortunately, once these collaboration workspaces have served their purpose, they often fall by the wayside. If no one (or nothing) intervenes to clean them up afterward, it results in a large amount of redundant data left within the tenant. This not only drives up storage costs but can cause difficulties for users when searching for appropriate content. (pg. 6)

Destruction of records is very necessary

Keep in mind that archiving just moves your problem to another place. It may produce short-term savings, but it’s not sustainable as a long-term strategy. Holding on to information that is no longer useful to the business can actually create more risk than deletion. The destruction of records is a very necessary, incredibly important activity that must be conducted in a way that can be defended in the future, if required. If records are destroyed improperly or if there’s any appearance of “spoliation” (the deliberate spoiling of potential evidence in litigation), the organisation could face allegations of attempted obstruction. (pg. 9)