Saving archive costs: here’s how to do it!

Many companies use SAP software. Invoices, packing slips, business documents: it all runs through SAP. Similarly, SAP puts documents in the archive, and that archive obviously needs storage space. For example, a client of ours also had such an archive. Not even hugely large and hosted by a cloud archive service several years ago. So far, not much going on.

Duration of data traffic

But. What the costs were for accessing and accessing the archive and sending information back and forth was not entirely clear. Indeed, those costs add up quickly because it is precisely the retrieval of data from such an archive in the cloud that costs money, not so much the storage of that data itself. For some time now, this customer has been storing the SAP archive on Silent Bricks. As a result, archival costs have been reduced 90 percent. In other words, the cloud archive was ten times more expensive than local storage on in-house hardware.

Tens of thousands of euros

That percentage is already very hefty, and in absolute amounts, that difference can reach tens of thousands of dollars per year, depending on the size of the archive and how often it is accessed. That second point in particular makes storing archival data in the cloud expensive. Not for nothing, then, do cloud services advertise with the claim that storage costs almost nothing with them and that is not untrue, it is the up- and especially downloading of data to the cloud archive where the costs are. And a program like SAP does this quite a lot, so do the math.

Growing awareness

For many business owners and executives, these costs were not in focus until recently, but fortunately that awareness is beginning to increase somewhat. Yet we still often see that the cost of using the cloud is a lot higher than initial expectations. It’s also hard to estimate: how much data traffic do you have with your cloud provider? That is work for specialists.

Want to know more?

We are happy to explain further. Please feel free to contact us!