Undercover Expenses: The Hidden Costs of Traditional Storage

On the surface, the traditional data storage model is simple. It’s made up of infrastructure for just three core areas: primary storage, backup, and disaster recovery. But beneath that apparent simplicity, lies a complex web of moving parts that demand both upfront investment and ongoing operational spend.

Some costs – such as the hard costs of NAS, file servers, and backup infrastructure – are obvious. On the other hand, there are many hidden costs associated with legacy on-premises storage, which may go unaccounted for in storage budgets. These still have the ability to drain resources, damage brand reputation, and limit business growth.

Here are four costs of the traditional storage model that could be flying under your radar.

1. Ransomware risks

In 2024, the average ransomware payment hit $2 million — and the cost doesn’t end when the ransom is paid. Fewer than half of enterprises recover within a week, causing them to lose additional revenue, brand reputation, and employee productivity. Last year, recovery costs alone averaged $2.73 million, up almost $1 million from 2023.

Traditional file storage typically relies on a centralized architecture, leaving enterprises exposed to widespread data loss in the event of a ransomware attack. Most legacy systems don’t have immutable backup or rollback capabilities built in, which means that additional backup infrastructure is needed and prevents businesses from recovering quickly after a breach.

With Nasuni, you can avoid these costs. Our detection algorithm continuously scans for signs of unusual behavior, to identify, isolate, and neutralize both known and zero-day attacks in real time, at the edge.

2. Backup and disaster recovery costs

Cyberattacks are just one of the many risks that modern enterprises face. Natural disasters, human error, and tech failure can also destroy data and cause downtime. To guard against this, businesses need robust backup and disaster recovery (DR) solutions. One option is to contract an external provider to supply and manage off-site or cloud-based DR infrastructure. But these contracts are costly and often come with recurring DR co-location or site fees.

Thanks to Nasuni’s Continuous File Versioning®, DR is built-in at no extra cost. Immutable snapshots of every file are created as frequently as every 60 seconds, letting you restore lost or corrupted files from object storage in less than 15 minutes. This eliminates the need for multiple additional separate backup or DR products.

3. Lost business productivity

Another factor that often gets overlooked when calculating the true cost of legacy file storage is lost employee productivity. That is time and money wasted when a workforce is unable to get on with their day-to-day business activities. This wastage can be caused by out-of-space issues, file transfer delays, file sync wait times, and long open times. And while you’re experiencing these bottlenecks, you’re still paying for the underlying file-sharing technology so your revenue opportunities take a double hit.

Nasuni solves this with virtual appliances that cache local copies of just the active file data, enabling fast access between international locations. With our Global File Acceleration capability, sync speeds improve the more edge locations your business has. And there are no hard costs for multi-site file sharing because file sync between on-prem or cloud locations is a basic part of our architecture.

4. Inefficient IT operations

If you’ve failed to factor in the time and labor it takes to deploy, maintain, and manage enterprise file storage, your estimates could be off by tens of thousands of dollars. With the traditional storage model, you have to manage hardware, migrations, upgrades, and vendor contracts. And all of the above multiply if you have several locations with storage to oversee.

Switching to Nasuni reduces or wipes out these costs entirely. The Nasuni Management Console gives IT a single-pane-of-glass on file data and our analytics provide insights based on age, location, and user to further simplify operations. Most of our customers report that moving to Nasuni cuts their IT infrastructure management costs by 75%.

Say goodbye to hidden costs with Nasuni

Modernizing your legacy file storage by switching to Nasuni doesn’t just slim down your capital expenditure, it also reveals – and removes – the hidden expenses of the traditional storage model. Your only outgoings are the annual Nasuni and object storage subscriptions, along with the value of the virtual appliances for high-performance edge access. There are no hard costs for backup, DR, or multi-site file sharing and you only pay for the capacity you really need. No sneaky extras, no nasty surprises—and no more hidden costs.

Worried about the undercover expenses of your existing infrastructure? Chat with a Nasuni representative about how we can protect your data – and your budget – today.