You’ve likely heard it all before: Bill Gates’ infamous quote, “content is king,” has had a modern update, with data now wearing the crown in today’s organizations. Data is invaluable for making business decisions, navigating competitive landscapes, and building rapport with customers and vendors. Leveraging data insights helps businesses lower overhead and increase revenues.

Yet, the world is more connected than ever, meaning organizations now have more data to manage than ever before. Data tiering comes to help organize and prioritize data to increase efficiency and outcomes.

What is Data Tiering?

Data tiering refers to an approach that shifts data based on its state and required level of availability within an organization. Data tiers have two primary classifications:

Hot Data

Data that requires frequent access is referred to as “hot” data. This includes information crucial to business operations that needs to be retrieved regularly. This data is always in demand and often in transit. Depending on the nature of your business, hot data may include documents, photos, and project files and may be stored on a cloud drive for high accessibility.

Cold Data

Cold (or cool) data refers to less frequently used elements. These files are necessary to keep on hand but are infrequently accessed and don’t affect day-to-day business demands. Cold data may include information required to meet regulatory compliance, including financial, customer, or patient records, or videos, photos, archival, backup, or disaster recovery data,

Tiered Data Storage

Leveraging tiered data storage takes hot and cold data into account and prioritizes the location based on classification. Tier 1 data storage is designed for high-priority data that is time-sensitive or must be available on-demand at real-time transfer rates. Tier 1 data may include stock market information to facilitate trading or network insights required by power companies to ensure the uptime of the electrical grid.

Benefits of Data Tiering

Data tiering (also known as storage tiering) benefits organizations in numerous ways, including:

Reduced Costs

Organizations can save on storage costs by opting for repositories that meet minimum requirements based on data hierarchies. High-availability storage with low latency tends to come at a premium price and is unnecessary for archival or backup data. Saving space and costs by electing only the required storage options lowers CapEx burdens.

Increased Efficiency

High-performance storage systems have their place, yet they tend to be less efficient. Moving cold or less critical data to lower tiers will reduce the demand for high-availability storage arrays, increasing their efficiency by only serving the data most likely to be requested at any given time.

Improved Disaster Recovery

With any luck, you’ll never need it, but if you do, it’s crucial to have reliable, efficient disaster recovery processes. Tiered storage ensures critical data is not only backed up but accessible when required for disaster recovery. Recovery time is drastically reduced when on-prem or cloud storage tiers are backed up separately according to classification. All data is held based on the type in their best possible locations.

How does Data Tiering Work?

Data tiering classifies data based on priority and business requirements. This efficient solution cuts backup and storage costs by archiving less critical data and only storing crucial data in high-availability locations. Data can be stored on-prem or in the cloud or a hybrid infrastructure based on business requirements. Tiering data lowers expenses and increases data availability while saving manual efforts to move and classify data continuously.