Reality Bytes is built on a simple idea: some of the most valuable conversations in technology start with opinions people are often reluctant to say out loud.
These sessions are designed to challenge accepted thinking, cut through industry hype, and explore the operational realities sitting behind popular trends, tools and best practices. Not because the conventional view is always wrong, but because real-world experience is usually more nuanced.
Each session brings together practical perspectives, evidence from the field, and a willingness to ask uncomfortable questions in pursuit of better outcomes, smarter decisions, and more grounded conversations about technology.
And that’s exactly why in this edition, Zade Fairweather, Technical Specialist Cloud at Inde Technology, is asking the question: Do you really need more storage?
Because sometimes the right response is not immediately buying more storage. It is sitting down and asking some harder questions first about visibility, governance, duplication and what data actually needs to exist in the first place.
By Zade Fairweather, Technical Specialist Cloud at Inde
Personal hot take: Macbooks are better than Windows laptops
Professional hot take: You don’t need more storage, you need to sit down or more specifically, it’s not a capacity problem. It’s an insight problem, a policy problem and an automation problem.
Audience survey results*: 94% agreed, 6% disagreed
*Inde survey at Reality Bytes event
Storage consumption is exploding. IDC predicts the global datasphere will grow to 394 zettabytes by 2028, while enterprise data management spending continues to accelerate as organisations struggle to keep pace with growing volumes of information.
Within organisations, the default response to this growth is usually the same: buy more storage. The cloud is designed to make adding storage frictionless, but the cost grows just as effortlessly.
Storage growth is not inherently a bad thing. As organisations evolve, business functions naturally become more complex, customer activity generates larger log volumes and backups are often retained for longer periods to meet operational or compliance requirements. These are all legitimate drivers of increased storage demand. But collectively, they can also obscure a more uncomfortable reality: a significant portion of storage growth is often self-inflicted, driven not by genuine business need, but by duplication, poor visibility, inconsistent retention practices and a lack of clear governance around what data should continue to exist at all.
Here are three unpopular opinions on why we should not jump straight to buying more storage, but instead take a moment to ask some harder questions first.
Organisations can usually tell you how fast storage is growing, but far fewer can tell you what is actually sitting inside the environment. In my experience, once teams properly investigate, they often uncover duplicated data, backups stretching way back, or verbose logs from applications nobody even uses anymore. The issue is the lack of visibility into what data exists, who owns it and whether it still provides value.
Visibility forces the real conversation. Organisations need to classify data so they understand what they are storing, how old it is, how often it is accessed and whether it still serves a genuine operational or compliance purpose. Because if you do not have visibility into your data, policy is just guesswork.
Most organisations have retention policies albeit often vague, inconsistently applied or quietly ignored as environments grow. Over time, teams default to keeping everything because deleting data feels riskier than retaining it indefinitely. I’ve seen teams buy more storage because it is often easier politically than deciding what should actually be removed.
Policy makes the decision. Once organisations understand what data exists, they can begin reviewing whether logs, backups and archived data are genuinely being retained for business or compliance reasons, or simply because nobody has challenged them. Effective policy creates clear ownership, realistic retention periods and the confidence to delete data when it is no longer required.
Even with good visibility and sensible policy, governance breaks down if enforcement relies on manual effort alone. Retention reviews get delayed, old backups remain untouched and lifecycle rules slowly become good intentions rather than operational controls.
Automation makes it stick. Modern storage platforms can enforce lifecycle management in the background, automatically tiering infrequently accessed data into cheaper storage while applying retention and deletion policies consistently over time. Without automation, governance rarely scales alongside modern data growth.
None of this suggests organisations should aggressively delete data or avoid legitimate storage investment. Business growth, compliance obligations and modern applications will continue driving genuine increases in storage demand.
Teams that are really empowered to take genuine ownership have answered these questions:
You might genuinely need more storage. But mature organisations prove it first. Before approving the next storage expansion, the better question is not “How do we buy more?” but “What are we afraid to delete, and why?”