The hidden costs of data waste: A call to action for businesses

There is a surprising amount of waste lurking in IT environments today, which means there is opportunity— for substantial savings if you have an intelligent data strategy. In a new Watts the Future video, NetApp’s Chief Technology Evangelist Matt Watts explores how data waste is a waste of money and what you can do right now to start saving big.

In the United Kingdom alone, businesses squander billions of pounds annually in storing data that they will never use again. This figure could easily balloon if you factor in the data explosion that has been fueled by AI.

According to a Gartner report, in 2024, global IT spending rose by 8.9%, amounting to $ 5.3 trillion USD. By 2028, this figure is projected to surpass $7.4 trillion USD. These values result in an exorbitant amount of waste. A Seagate report from IDC indicates up to 68% of data that companies pay to store and to protect is single use, meaning that it will never be accessed after it has been created.

Add to this expense the impact of recent licensing cost increases for virtualization. Companies initially invested in virtualization to reduce waste, but it actually led to more waste. Today, many companies have VMs that they don’t use but that still consume licenses. Or they have VMs that were overprovisioned and so consume licenses that they shouldn’t.

So how do we fix it? Watts says that it begins with building an intelligent data infrastructure, which solves many of these challenges and provides:

• A single pane of glass to manage your entire heterogeneous on-premises and cloud infrastructure, helping you more easily identify waste and overprovisioning
• Cloud optimization capabilities so that your workloads use the most suitable, highly available, and cost-effective resources
• Data analytics tools to gain insight into your entire data landscape, including data inventory, access patterns, and the presence of sensitive information
• Highly efficient and truly unified data storage that scales seamlessly from entry to enterprise levels, supporting various applications and language requirements

Data waste in IT is more pervasive and significant than you might have realized. But it’s never too late to start saving and become a budget hero. Just think of all the things that your organization can do with the savings from identifying unused data, increasing your utilization, and reducing your licensing costs or your cloud spending.

Check out Matt’s video to learn more or to explore how to build an intelligent data infrastructure to start your journey toward IT efficiency and cost savings.