Switching to electronic recordkeeping is a big step for any business. It can make your office more efficient, reduce clutter, and help you cut many of the expenses tied to paper-based systems.
That being said, storing records digitally comes with its own costs, and the ability to calculate and manage those expenses ahead of time is important.
In this guide, we’ll help you get a clearer understanding of how you can plan your business’s data storage costs. We’ll also share a few ways you can reduce recordkeeping expenses by making informed decisions about how and where you store your digital files..
How Often Will You Use Your Digital Data?
How often you access certain data plays a big role in what you’ll pay for digital storage. Breaking your data into categories based on how often it’s used can help you choose storage options that make sense for your needs while avoiding extra costs for speed or bandwidth you don’t actually need.
One simple way to approach this is to sort your data into three groups:
- Hot Data: This is the information you use often and need to access quickly, such as active customer files, ongoing projects, or frequently updated documents. These should be kept in high-performance storage so they’re always ready when you need them.
- Warm Data: This is data you only use from time to time. It’s not as urgent as hot data, but you still want it to be reasonably easy to access. Examples include archived project files, semi-active databases, or older customer records.
- Cold Data: This is data you rarely touch, such as long-term archives, old records, or backups stored for compliance. Since it’s not needed often, it can be kept in slower, lower-cost storage.
By storing your data according to how you plan on using it, you can manage your records storage budget more efficiently.
Keeping hot data in high-performance storage ensures that frequently used records can be accessed and retrieved much more quickly, at the trade off of paying a slightly higher cost per GB of storage.
On the other hand, storing infrequently accessed data in a cost-effective storage option like Amazon Glacier helps you control costs while ensuring your records are still accessible when you need them. In this case, storage costs are generally lower per GB, though accessing the data is slower and more expensive. This makes it ideal for archival purposes where the data needs to be stored but not frequently accessed.
Understanding how and when you will use your data can help you to plan for future storage needs while ensuring your system can handle changes over time.
What Storage Option Best Meets Your Needs?
Now that you understand the types of data you will be managing and the options available, it’s time to choose a storage solution that balances cost and performance to meet your business needs. Different storage technologies offer varying benefits, so it’s important to evaluate your options carefully.
Self-Hosted Storage
Self-hosted storage gives you complete control and security, as your data is stored on servers within your own facility. This option often requires a significant upfront investment in hardware and ongoing maintenance costs to keep things running smoothly. You will need to employ IT staff to manage and maintain the system properly. Self-hosted storage may be suitable if you have stringent security requirements or prefer to keep strict control over your data.
Cloud-Based Storage
Cloud-based storage offers increased flexibility and scalability with pay-as-you-go pricing, meaning you only pay for the storage you use. This makes it a cost-effective solution for many businesses.
Cloud storage also provides remote access from any location, which is beneficial for businesses with remote teams or multiple locations. This ease of access and ability to scale storage resources quickly makes cloud-based storage an attractive option for businesses looking to manage costs while maintaining flexibility.
In most cases, setting up cloud storage is easier and cheaper because you don’t need to worry about purchasing any hardware or equipment. However, you still may need at least one IT specialist to get things setup securely, and to help you monitor and maintain your system.
Which One is Better?
The truth is, each storage option has its own pros and cons. Self hosted storage offers control and security but requires a larger initial investment by your business. Cloud storage provides flexibility and lower upfront costs, but may involve data transfer fees and less control over data security.
Key Cost Factors
When evaluating these storage options, consider the following cost factors:
- Cost per Terabyte: How much does each terabyte of storage cost? This can vary significantly between on-premises and cloud-based solutions.
- Data Transfer Costs: Some storage solutions charge for data transfer, especially when moving data in and out of cloud storage.
- Compression and Deduplication: Compression reduces the amount of space occupied by your files by reducing the size of each file by doing something.. This can reduce the amount of storage needed, lowering costs. However, files that are compressed generally need to be uncompressed in order to be used
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): If you are going to be storing your digital files on your own servers, you should evaluate the long-term costs, including maintenance, upgrades, and potential migration expenses down the road.
How Much Will It Cost to Store Your Scanned Documents?
Calculating storage costs can help you budget effectively and choose the right storage solutions for your needs. Here is how you do it:
Step 1. Determine Your Average File Size
The size of a scanned document can vary based on the resolution and format you choose for your scanning project. For example, scanning at higher resolutions like 300 dpi (dots per inch), will produce larger files, compared to lower resolutions like 150 dpi. Just keep in mind that if you need the extra fidelity, storing your documents at a higher resolution will cost you more.
The file format you choose will also impact the size of your archive. PDF and TIFF are the most common formats for scanned documents, each with different characteristics and file sizes. PDFs can be compressed to reduce file size, but this might affect image quality slightly.
If you plan on using OCR to digitize the text in your files, your file sizes will continue to grow. On average, the typical size you can expect when scanning at 300 dpi are:
- Black and White: Around 38KB per page
- Grayscale: Around 301KB per page
- Color: Around 577KB and up per page
Step 2. Estimate The Volume Of Documents
Multiply the average file size by the number of documents or pages you plan to scan. For example, if you have 100,000 pages of color documents at 577KB each, you would need approximately 57.7GB of storage.
- 1,000 documents at 577KB each = 577,000KB = 577MB
- 10,000 documents at 577KB each = 5,770,000KB = 5.77GB
- 100,000 documents at 577KB each = 57,700,000KB = 57.7GB
Step. 3 Select a Storage Solution
Select the storage option that meets your needs and budget based on what we discussed about access. In our case, lets go ahead and assume you will be using Amazon S3 Simple Storage. The current pricing is $0.023 per GB/ per month.
Step 4. Run the Numbers
Use the information from the storage provider to calculate the costs based on your total data volume estimated in step 3.
Cost=Storage Volume (in GB)×Cost per GB
Cost=57.7 GB×0.023 $/GBCost=57.7GB×0.023$/GB
Cost= $1.3271 per month.
So, storing 57.7GB at a rate of $0.023 per GB would cost approximately $1.33 per month.
Wrapping Up: Storage Planning Matters
There’s a lot to think about during a document scanning project, timelines, budgets, what needs to be scanned, and more. With so many moving parts, storage planning often gets overlooked. But addressing it early not only helps you understand the full scope of your project, it also shows you how much you could reduce your records storage costs over time.
At SecureScan, we don’t just scan your documents and send you on your way. We work with you from the start to estimate file sizes, decide what needs to be stored long-term, and choose the most cost-effective storage solution for your needs, whether that’s in the cloud, on your own servers, or a combination of both.
If you’re ready to start a scanning project, we’re here to help you make smart decisions every step of the way. Reach out to learn how we can support your team with scanning, storage, and everything in between.