In today’s digital age, the volume of data businesses generate is growing exponentially. From customer transactions to compliance logs and archived communications, data is at the heart of daily operations. But as data grows, so do the costs – particularly for businesses storing everything on expensive, high-performance storage.

The reality is, not all data is equal. While some datasets are accessed frequently and require top-tier performance, the vast majority of business data becomes "cold" within weeks or months. Retaining this infrequently accessed data on premium storage is no longer sustainable. It leads to bloated storage bills, degraded performance, and unnecessary complexity.

The Cost of Overprovisioning

Many SMBs and mid-sized organisations overinvest in on-premises storage capacity to accommodate long-term retention. This often results in underutilised infrastructure, with high upfront capital expenditure and ongoing maintenance costs. It's a strategy born out of outdated assumptions – namely, that all data must remain instantly accessible from the fastest system available.

Why Hybrid Tiering is the Smarter Choice  

Hybrid Tiering offers a better alternative. Also known as Long-Term Retention, this strategy enables businesses to automatically move cold or infrequently accessed backup data from performant primary storage (such as Dell Data Domain) to cost-effective cloud storage (like Wasabi).

With this approach, frequently accessed data remains on high-performance local storage, ensuring performance isn't compromised. Meanwhile, older or lower-priority data is seamlessly offloaded to the cloud, significantly reducing storage costs.

How Synapse Makes It Effortless  

Synapse manages the entire Hybrid Tiering lifecycle. From data classification and deduplication to automation and compliance monitoring, everything is handled as part of our managed service. This removes the burden from internal IT teams and ensures your business remains agile, secure, and compliant.

Our use of Dell Data Domain and Wasabi ensures that deduplication is performed before data is archived, reducing the footprint and transfer load. With Wasabi, you benefit from no egress charges, high durability, and support for immutable storage, protecting your data from ransomware and accidental deletion.

The Bottom Line  

Keeping all data on expensive, high-performance storage isn't just unsustainable – it's unnecessary. By adopting a Hybrid Tiering strategy, businesses can optimise costs, improve performance, and simplify data management.

Ready to learn more about how Synapse can help you cut storage costs without compromising compliance or access? Stay tuned for our next article or explore our Hybrid Tiering solution today.