As we kick off Clean Out Your Inbox Week, it’s a good time to take a step back and evaluate not just our email storage, but our overall storage capacity. Recent studies have shown that most companies are wasting as much as 60% of their storage capacity due to poor monitoring and underutilization of automated tools, causing unnecessary costs on wasted storage.

So, how can we tackle this problem and make the most of our storage capacity?

First, take stock of your storage assets. Many IT professionals don’t even know how many terabytes of capacity they have on hand or what their utilization rate is. Regularly reviewing and optimizing storage usage can help ensure that only necessary files and documents are stored and are easily accessible when needed. This can be achieved by creating clear labels and categories for files and implementing file compression, deduplication and tiering.

An important physical storage optimisation technique is to implement thin provisioning, which sets aside a certain amount of disk space and only allocates this as it is needed by an application or service. This helps to prevent overprovisioning and ensure that storage is used efficiently, being particularly useful for virtual environments, where multiple virtual machines might be using the same physical storage resources.

For cloud storage, the best practice is to ensure that you understand the business’ storage needs, including the type and volume of data, the storage scalability, and its accessibility, and purchase the most cost-effective storage option. Data compliance is also a major factor in choosing the right storage solution, especially when dealing with sensitive and restricted data that must be appropriately safeguarded. Microsoft Azure assists in this situation by listing common baselines and standards, such as ISO 27001.
ISO 27001 is an international standard that outlines a framework for an information security management system (ISMS) which provides a systematic approach to managing sensitive company information so that it remains secure. It covers people, processes, and technology, including risk management, incident management, and business continuity planning. 

Something which all users can assist with is ensuring duplicate and redundant files are either deleted or properly archived, and so keeping used storage space to a minimum, reducing the overall storage cost. This can be achieved by implementing version history, which logs each edited version of files. Similarly, file archiving frees up main storage space by moving ‘old’ files to a separate storage location for a reduced cost. This can also be automated with the use of retention policies, whereby if a certain file property matches the set criteria, it will be archived, e.g. if a file was last opened over one year ago.

In conclusion, taking the time to evaluate and optimize our storage capacity not only saves money and resources, but also ensures that our data is well-organized and easily accessible. So, let’s make the most of Clean Out Your Inbox Week and tackle our storage capacity head on. It’s a good practice to review and optimize storage capacity periodically to keep up with the data growth and ensure efficient use of resources. Additionally, it’s a good idea to monitor the storage usage regularly, setting up alerts when the storage is getting full so that you can take action before it becomes a problem.