TURNING THE HIGH COST OF UNMANAGED DATA INTO VALUABLE ASSETS
From drain to gain.
Diskover addresses how wastages, starting with human resources, storage expenses, and the impact of unmanaged ROT data alone, add up—quickly and exponentially.
Explore how optimizing the efficiency of people and processes with Diskover can lead to immediate savings and long-term value.
THE COST OF HUMAN RESOURCES
The human toll when data lacks management.
Quantifying the cost of wasted man-hours from unmanaged data is challenging, yet it’s likely the most significant expense organizations face.
Poor data management takes a significant toll on productivity, leading to wasted time and resources as teams struggle to find, organize, and utilize information. Inefficient workflows and disjointed systems create bottlenecks, delaying decisions and increasing frustration. The result is not just higher operational costs but also reduced employee effectiveness and morale.
Addressing these inefficiencies through better data management is essential to reclaiming time, optimizing performance, and cutting other unnecessary costs.
DO THE MATH
Use this simple formula and your own figures to estimate basic productivity lost due to unmanaged data.
AVERAGE HOURLY RATE
$44 X
Average as of December 2024, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for various positions dealing with data daily.
HOURS LOST PER WEEK
12.3 X
An aggregate of average time lost searching and recreating data—does not include time lost due to a myriad of other data-related factors.
NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES
100 =
Change for your own number of employees dealing with data, from data creation to IT.
AVERAGE ANNUAL LOSSES RELATED TO HUMAN RESOURCES
$2,706,000
This figure is very conservative—we promise we’re not trying to scare you (well, maybe just a little). Our goal is to help you see just how much money quietly slips away due to unmanaged data.
UNMANAGED IMPACT
THE DISKOVER EDGE
Time wasted searching.
Employees spend about 1.8 hours per day, or roughly 9.3 hours per week.
Unified view of all your data, no matter where it is.
Diskover’ single pane of glass ensures users can quickly locate the files they need across their entire data estate.
Time wasted recreating data.
Employees spend about 3 hours a week recreating data considered lost because it can’t be found.
Global visibility and searchability of all your data.
Diskover’s multiple search tools and precise findability ensure users can quickly locate existing files.
Time wasted due to manual processes.
Employees lose much of their workweek to manual processes, compounded by human errors and inefficiencies stemming from the lack of an effective data management system. Over 40% of workers spend at least a quarter of their week on such tasks, according to a recent survey.
User-triggered and scheduled workflows.
Diskover offers a wide range of features and integrations designed to enhance overall efficiency by streamlining processes and reducing the risk of human errors. With scheduled workflows and user-triggered automation, it significantly boosts productivity across teams.
THE COST OF UNMANAGED STORAGE
Buy more storage, they said, it’s cheap, they said.
Buying more storage may seem like an easy, time-saving solution to accommodate growing data needs, but it comes with significant drawbacks. Don’t get us wrong, we dearly value our storage partners—but even they understand that ignoring data management is far from a sustainable solution.
In the short term, increasing your storage footprint might alleviate capacity issues. However, this approach quickly becomes a costly cycle as storage needs continue to grow unchecked. The financial burden includes not only the upfront cost of additional storage but also ongoing expenses for maintenance, energy, and administration.
Over time, unmanaged data will consume these resources inefficiently, leading to increased costs and operational inefficiencies. Addressing data management instead provides a sustainable, cost-effective alternative, ensuring that storage is optimized and valuable data is prioritized.
DO THE MATH
AVERAGE COST FOR THE MOST COMMON STORAGE TYPES
Storage costs vary by vendor, but these estimates are conservative and based on data from fall 2024.
CALCULATIONS BASED ON:
1 Petabyte
= 1,000 TERABYTES
CLOUD
STANDARD | ANNUAL COST
$180K to $300K
COLD/ARCHIVE | ANNUAL COST
$12K to $60K
MAIN ADDITIONAL COSTS
HIGH-SPEED
ON-PREM HIGH-PERFORMANCE
$500K to $1M
ENTERPRISE NAS/SAN
$300K to $600K
MAIN ADDITIONAL COSTS
PER TERABYTE
AVERAGE COST =
Average obtained by evenly distributing 1 petabyte across these 4 categories and aggregating their costs.
PART OF THAT COST IS RECURRING!
$369,000
This figure is extremely conservative, and doesn’t account for the additional costs mentioned above.
UNMANAGED IMPACT
THE DISKOVER EDGE
Uncontrolled growth and use of resources.
Buying more storage instead of managing data leads to escalating costs and inefficiencies, compounded by a lack of visibility into the data estate. Without a clear understanding of what data exists, where it’s stored, or its value, decisions become reactive and often misguided. This results in storing irrelevant data on costly tiers, duplication of efforts, and missed opportunities for optimization, further straining resources and budgets.
Unified data estate visibility and insight.
Diskover addresses these challenges by providing a unified view and powerful analytics across your entire data estate. With Diskover, organizations gain a clear understanding of their data, enabling them to organize it effectively and create actionable plans to take control. While a growing storage footprint is inevitable in some capacity, Diskover equips businesses with the insights needed to plan ahead and make informed, sound decisions. By aligning data with its purpose and value, Diskover helps reduce inefficiencies, optimize storage usage, and maintain control over expanding resources.
Escalating costs.
Buying more storage instead of managing data drives up costs and strains budgets. Unnecessary spending on high-performance storage for unused or irrelevant data leads to wasted resources. Over time, this unchecked growth creates a cycle of escalating expenses and inefficiencies, leaving businesses with bloated budgets and poorly optimized systems.
Controlled costs and data estate.
Diskover helps curb storage costs by providing visibility into your data and automating its management. It identifies unused, duplicate, or outdated files and ensures they are deleted or stored on the most cost-effective tiers. Leveraging a rich metadata catalog and business-related insights, Diskover also manages project lifecycles by moving data to the appropriate tier based on its value and usage. This optimization reduces unnecessary expenses, enhances efficiency, and helps businesses maintain control over their budgets while aligning data with organizational needs.
The wrong data in the wrong place.
Buying more storage without managing data creates inefficiency and skyrocketing costs. Storing the wrong data on expensive tiers wastes resources, reduces system efficiency, and leads to data sprawl, making it harder to manage and utilize valuable information.
Data tiering automation.
Diskover solves this problem with automated data tiering, ensuring data is stored on the right tiers based on its usage and value. By analyzing and categorizing data, Diskover moves infrequently accessed files to cost-effective storage while keeping critical data on high-performance tiers.
THE COST OF ROT DATA
The price of ROT: data you can’t afford to keep.
Diskover isn’t in the business of managing ROT data, but identifying and addressing it is a natural byproduct of our platform. By providing deep visibility into your data estate, Diskover effortlessly highlights redundant, obsolete, and trivial data, enabling organizations to reclaim tremendous storage space.
Data ROT—redundant, obsolete, and trivial data—can silently inflate operational costs and hinder productivity. Storing ROT data consumes valuable storage space, drives up infrastructure expenses, and increases energy usage. Beyond direct costs, ROT data complicates workflows, making it harder for teams to locate and manage critical information, ultimately wasting valuable time and resources.
Left unchecked, this clutter not only strains budgets but also exposes organizations to security and compliance risks. Addressing ROT data through efficient identification and removal is essential to cutting costs, optimizing storage, and streamlining operations.
DO THE MATH
Use this simple formula and your own figures to estimate how much you can save by eliminating/managing ROT data alone.
AVERAGE ROT DATA
33% X
Average % of ROT data organizations without a data management solution have on their storage estate.
1PB AVERAGE STORAGE COST
$369,000 =
Aggregate of average storage cost for 1 petabyte as calculated in the previous section.
AVERAGE COST OF ROT FOR 1PB
$121,770
Another conservative figure that, left unchecked, can significantly inflate storage costs, strain resources and expose you to security and compliance risks.
UNMANAGED IMPACT
THE DISKOVER EDGE
Money and resources drain.
ROT consumes expensive storage, clutters systems, and increases operational overhead without adding any value.
Global visibility and easy identification.
Diskover’s global visibility makes identifying ROT data effortless. While managing ROT isn’t its primary function, uncovering and addressing it is a powerful outcome of the platform. By delivering deep insights into your entire data estate, Diskover quickly highlights ROT data, allowing organizations to reclaim valuable storage space and optimize resources.
A growing problem that won’t go away.
Allowing ROT data to grow unchecked leads to spiraling storage costs, reduced system performance, and increased complexity. As it accumulates, valuable resources are wasted, making it harder to find, manage, and leverage critical data. Without intervention, ROT becomes an ever-growing burden that drains budgets and hampers efficiency.
Ongoing automated data hygiene.
Diskover tackles ROT data continuously through automated workflows that run scheduled tasks. These workflows detect and manage redundant, obsolete, and trivial data, either automating its deletion or moving it to lower-cost storage tiers if manual confirmation is needed before deletion—Diskover ensures the data is flagged and ready for review, enabling efficient and cost-effective ROT management.
Industry-specific ROT hiding in plain sight.
Different industries generate their own “specialized-ROT” in the form of temporary or intermediate files that often go undetected and consume significant storage space. For example:
These specialized-ROT files can silently drain resources, making efficient data management essential.
Tools for industry-specific datasets.
Over time, Diskover has developed a robust library of tools to identify industry-specific ROT. These tools, tailored to address the unique challenges of specialized ROT across industries, have become invaluable for managing those undesirable datasets. By leveraging this expertise, organizations can tackle their specific ROT challenges with precision and efficiency.
THE OTHER HIDDEN COSTS OF UNMANAGED DATA
When data becomes a liability.
Without a data management solution in place, organizations face a range of risks—from escalating costs and security vulnerabilities to operational inefficiencies and missed opportunities.
Security risks.
Performance degradation.
Business continuity risks.
Lost opportunities.
Environmental impact.
Scalability challenges.
GET STARTED WITH
DISKOVER
Ready to manage your data everywhere from anywhere?