It is a fact that the cost of hard drives is falling rapidly and the capacity is rising even faster. But is data storage really cheap? Developments in data storage have been amazing like Seagate producing 48 terabyte HAMR hard disk drives and Sony already selling quad-layer Blu-Ray disks with a capacity of 128GB. However, if disk storage capacities are rapidly increasing while the price per GB continues to fall, is storing business data cheap? And how do businesses prefer storing data these days – in th
e data center, in a private cloud, or in the public cloud?
Rahul Chopra of Clix Capital says storage costs have indeed gone up significantly in recent years especially with the rise of public clouds. However, they will continue to offer not only a variety of storage options but agility and flexibility to set up and use them in real-time. “The speed with which businesses are generating and storing data, one needs to invest a lot for that kind of storage in a private data center. Also, there is an additional cost to maintain redundancy and disaster recovery. Therefore, public clouds will gain more and more popularity in this space. Moreover, security concerns with regard to storing critical and sensitive business data in the public clouds have gone down significantly with the way these services are maturing and offering adequate controls,” he says.
CLOUD CHANGES LANDSCAPE
Shreeraj Deshpande of Future Generali India Insurance too points out the popularity of cloud computing, which he says has been a significant factor influencing the storage landscape in recent years. “Public cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud have reshaped the storage market by offering highly-scalable architectures that are increasingly becoming an integral part of businesses’ overall storage strategies,” he says.
This trend, according to him, has impacted how organizations store and process information, with common enterprise applications such as CRM, collaboration tools, and email now being hosted on cloud platforms. “So, with too many players starting to offer these unique propositions, this has definitely benefited organizations to negotiate more. We could say the cost of storing data is definitely on a decreasing trend,” he says.
Rahul Bhargava of InCred too finds that the cost of storing data is minimal and it is declining across all mediums. It has become inexpensive, with cloud storage charges as low as a few rupees per GB)/moof data and it is highly unlikely that it will show up as a major expense in a company’s P&L, he asserts.
CLOUD OPTIONS
Rachit Chawla believes the cost trends are moving upwards. “More and more companies have realized the importance of storing their own data. Hence, very few cloud-based companies are available in the market. These are actually playing a very active role for fintech companies like us. Hence, the cost of storing data is an uptrend,” he says.
Prashant Deshpande of Shriram Transport Finance says currently the company is using the private cloud but is exploring public cloud options. “Our data storage is designed in a tiered architecture where various categories of data are assigned to different storage media. This helps us to control the cost and space in the data center. The data storage design has been finalized after considering multiple factors like frequency of access, easy and instantaneous access, the security of data transfer, etc. Where high data input and output operations are required, we use solid-state drive (SSD), and to store large amounts of acquired data in a near-line fashion we use SAS storage. Here we have automated the process and tiering happens accordingly,” he explains the existing system in the group.
Nilesh Sangoi of Fincare Small Finance Bank finds that data storage costs are constantly coming down every year, whether it is in the data center, in a private cloud, or in the public cloud.
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