Organizations are increasingly utilizing – and storing – data for daily operations. They depend on it for internal and external coordination, record-keeping, and more.
The downside is the need to deal with the rising costs of maintaining terabytes of digital data and files.
Surf Life Saving Australia (SLSA), a nonprofit organization that handles peak coastal water safety and rescue, had to contend with the difficulties brought by overflowing data and storage costs.
Growing File Volumes, Swelling Storage Costs
Right off Bondi Beach in Sydney, SLSA’s work involves recording and archiving video footage and photographs and keeping historical records and statistics. To compound matters, staff simply couldn’t manually delete files to make space for storage.
“Often new staff won’t know the history behind data being stored and are hesitant to just delete what they don’t know about,” said Scott Randall, SLSA’s National ICT Unit manager.
“Nobody was going to sit there and delete it – no one is brave enough to delete data, and it was too manual for IT. But we couldn’t keep paying each month.”
At one point, the organization had amassed over 10TB of data. Because deleting these files was not an option, SLSA had to face additional monthly storage costs.
Redirecting Resources to What Really Matters
For the nonprofit, putting a stop to their increasing IT and storage costs was crucial for their mission of coastal safety.
“Every month when it was time to pay the invoice for extra storage, I thought about everything else that money could go to,” Randall said. “Every dollar that is spent on IT are dollars that can’t go back to the clubs and rescue efforts.”
So, along with their IT service provider Exigo Tech, SLSA searched for a solution to address their rising storage costs.
File Recovery and Management for End-Users
Maurice Bonotto, head of sales at Exigo Tech, explained the solution they needed for SLSA: “Our goal is to archive at least 7TB of data so we can stop paying for extra storage.”
However, the challenge was making sure the solution allowed end-user restores – it was critical for SLSA to not burden admins with basic tasks such as recovering files, moving data, and creating links.
“We searched the market but had trouble finding a product that offered this capability. AvePoint was the only one that met this requirement,” Bonotto said.
AvePoint Cloud Archiving Offers Lifeline vs. Storage Costs
SLSA and Exigo Tech used AvePoint Cloud Archiving to identify unused or inactive content and move it to lower-cost storage tiers or archive it and keep it in place. It also gave end-users any time and granular restores while providing admins comprehensive monitoring and auditing.
Randall said that from trying to maintain over 10TB of data, SLSA now archives data that has not been used for over two years – while still having the confidence to restore it if needed.
With AvePoint solutions, SLSA reduced storage costs by 50%.
From initially paying additional storage month-on-month, SLSA has come a long way. They transitioned to a more sustainable storage solution with AvePoint, slashing storage costs by half. And for a nonprofit with a mission, that’s a huge win.
Phoebe Magdirila is a Senior Content Marketing Specialist at AvePoint, covering SaaS management, backup, and governance. With a decade of technology journalism experience, Phoebe creates content to help businesses accelerate and manage their SaaS journey.
