Establish a Baseline to Know Your Real Storage Costs
Before anyone swaps arrays or pushes data to the cloud, I establish a baseline. I account for power and space, licensing and support, hardware age, growth rates, and — too often overlooked — the human time required to keep everything running. With that in hand, I model a five-year total cost of ownership for the status quo and compare it with modernization options. The goal isn’t shiny new tech; it’s a defensible ROI and a predictable trajectory.
Segment to Stop Treating All Data the Same
Video archives, day-to-day productivity data, and artificial intelligence and analytics pipelines have very different profiles. Video favors sustained ingesting and retrieval through a video management stack backed by storage tuned for that pattern. Office productivity benefits most from tiering, compression and deduplication. AI typically demands different performance characteristics. A single monolith rarely excels across all three. I recommend aligning platforms to workloads and resisting the urge to force one tool to do everything.
READ MORE: On-demand storage is a game-changer for government agencies.
Automate the Mundane and Redeploy Talent
Modern arrays and management consoles remove an enormous amount of manual toil: carving volumes, monitoring capacity, compressing and tiering, even routine remediation. When I replace busywork with policy and automation, operations become faster and more reliable. More importantly, agencies can refocus people on higher-value work that citizens actually notice — service improvements, quality and new capabilities.
Use the Right Tier at the Right Time
Not all data deserves premium, on-prem capacity all the time. I encourage clients to identify “cold,” or infrequently accessed, data and shift it to economical tiers, including cloud, while reserving fast, local capacity for active data sets and critical systems. That one move routinely frees meaningful headroom and buys time for a cleaner modernization path.
Consolidate and Rightsize to Adjust Costs
Consolidation is about more than fewer boxes. It reduces power and footprint, simplifies management, tightens failure domains and makes it easier to standardize on automation. When I rightsize platforms to actual needs, instead of perceived peak, agencies see both lower run-rate spending and better day-two operations. Resilience improves because there’s less complexity and more consistency.
DIVE DEEPER: Cities upgrade storage for maximum scalability.
Optimize Now To Fund What’s Next
The payoff isn’t just a smaller bill. When storage is efficient and predictable, it becomes the foundation for improvements leaders want to make elsewhere: modernizing contact centers, piloting agentic AI to simplify complex citizen tasks, or scaling sensor and camera programs without surprise costs. I frame storage optimization as a way to generate the dollars — and the technical readiness — to invest in these outcomes.
A practical playbook I use with agencies:
- Inventory and assess. Capture true run-rate costs, growth, risk and effort.
- Segment by workload. Separate video, productivity and AI needs; assign the right platform to each.
- Turn on efficiency. Tiering, compression and deduplication should be defaults, not afterthoughts.
- Move cold data. Use cloud or lower-cost tiers for retention and audit needs.
- Consolidate and rightsize. Reduce footprint and complexity; upgrade aging arrays where the ROI is clear.
- Automate operations. Replace tickets and manual steps with policy and templates.
- Finance smartly. Consider refresh options, financing and service-based models to overcome upfront hurdles.
Every agency is at a different maturity level. Some know their costs precisely; others need help discovering them. I start with a storage assessment that benchmarks today and models several futures over a five-year horizon — refresh and consolidation, selective cloud, targeted workload platforms and automation. I work across the major vendors and remain agnostic so the recommendation maps to outcomes, not a preset preference. From spending analysis through implementation, I stay focused on lowering total cost, improving resilience and preparing your data for what you’ll do with it next.
