DigitalCFO Newsroom | 31 August 2022
Veritas Technologies is warning that businesses are facing a cost crisis for collaborative working tools as post-COVID working practices begin to catch up with them.
- Covid and the rise of remote working has led to ballooning levels of Microsoft SharePoint and Teams data
- Lack of in-built options to archive data causing users to reach their storage limits
- Businesses need to act now to avoid potentially paying over 20 times more than they need to
Veritas Technologies, a leader in multi-cloud data management, is warning that businesses are facing a cost crisis for collaborative working tools as post-COVID working practices begin to catch up with them.
The use of cloud collaboration services, such as Microsoft SharePoint (the storage and sharing platform used by Office 365 and Microsoft Teams), rapidly accelerated at the start of the pandemic. But, with very few providers of collaboration tools offering options to archive files, many businesses are finding that their data volumes and cost overruns are now ballooning out of control. If left unaddressed, those businesses will find themselves paying the high price of ‘storage overages’ for data that they’re no longer using and should have archived.
As businesses in Singapore grapple with rising inflation, supply chain issues, labour shortages and cyber threats, a sudden step up in cloud storage costs is the last thing they need. Businesses can get ahead of the issue by adopting third-party solutions to automatically archive legacy data from cloud services, but few are aware of this.
Andy Ng, Vice President and Managing Director for Asia South and Pacific Region at Veritas, explains: “At the start of the pandemic many companies embraced cloud collaboration tools to empower employees with mobility solutions and minimise work disruptions. As a result, by the end of 2020, the number of SharePoint accounts shot up to over 200 million. However, with many cloud collaboration tools, including SharePoint, lacking a native archive function, much of the data created since the advent of the pandemic is all stacking up in ‘hot’ storage. This means that some companies are paying to keep every Teams chat from every employee from two years ago on the most expensive tier of storage.”
Hot storage refers to storage media that offers fast and easy access to data, typically based on premium hardware with highly optimised connectivity. Its counterpart, cold storage, often uses tape or other cheaper media which allow data to be stored for compliance purposes, where it is typically kept offline and rarely accessed.
Ng continues: “Collaboration solutions, like SharePoint and Teams, have helped businesses to weather the COVID storm and accelerate the shift to the new hybrid working model. No one wants to see costs getting in the way of businesses for the ongoing use of these collaboration tools. Hence, it makes sense to keep them affordable and practical by bringing in third-party archiving to move unused data to cold storage, whilst keeping it searchable and accessible to the business.”
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 that businesses are already using for their hot data, and without compromising data privacy and sovereignty requirements.
Ng said, “We estimate that storage could be as much as 22 times cheaper for businesses that move from paying for extra capacity in SharePoint, to archiving their data to more affordable storage tiers*.”
*Based on a typical price of $153 per TB per month for SharePoint overages compared to the quoted cost of $676 for 100TB of Azure Storage 3-year Reserved Capacity in a cool tier.
