Data Compression Can Increase Cloud Savings

A recent survey from Rackspace found that many companies are moving to the cloud to save money and increase profits. The survey polled 1,300 companies in the United States and United Kingdom that used the cloud between December 2012 and January 2013.

Many companies achieved operational savings by moving to the cloud, with 88 percent of companies surveyed saying the cloud had reduced costs. Additionally, 56 percent of respondents said that switching to the cloud helped them increase profits.

The survey demonstrates that cost is a huge factor for companies that want to realize high returns on their IT investments. One way for companies to save even more money through the cloud is to compress their data before it goes into storage. Data compression software can reduce the size of large files so that they take up a fraction of the space. Because many companies pay according to the amount of capacity used, reducing file sizes before making a cloud migration can result in large savings. Companies that put sensitive data in the cloud run into challenges because you can compress encrypted data. Those companies need software that compresses and encrypts data at the same time. 

And those savings will only get larger over time. CloudTech reported that "big data" has become so large that it could more accurately be described as "huge data." Each year, companies amass more information that they have to store. Although terabyte storage is becoming increasingly common, it may be more space than companies need. If they find ways to store their data more efficiently, then it will be more cost-effective for them to manage that data as it grows in volume.