Cloud Storage Costs and Secure Optimization

Understanding cloud storage costs

How much does cloud storage cost in reality? To answer that question, we’ll need to get a few things out of the way first. Let’s start with a little background on what the bills are actually for—the core elements of storage costs:

Cost factor	What it is and what to know
Storage capacity charges	Price for the raw disk space, billed per gigabyte/month Differs depending on offered services’ performance or latency
Storage tiers	Hot/frequently accessed storage: immediate availability, higher per-GB costs, no charge for data retrieval Cool/infrequently accessed storage: cost savings for archival data, minimum storage duration charges, more expensive retrieval Archive/cold storage: lowest cost, significant retrieval latency and fees
API request costs	Storage APIs provide additional capabilities, such as automation or data transformation; billed independently of raw storage space
Operational overhead	The cost of provisioning, maintaining, optimizing, and troubleshooting your storage service of choice Operational overhead for cloud storage is generally much smaller than in on-premises environments
Egress fees	Egress fees cover the cost of transferring your data outside the cloud provider network
Cross-region replication	Satisfies additional durability, reliability, or latency requirements Replication costs extra; storage pricing also differs depending on the region
Early deletion charges	Fee for deleting data stored in colder tiers before the minimum required storage period
Request-based pricing	An additional fee billed for requests; prices depend on the type of request (e.g., GET/read, PUT/write) Request-based charges usually don’t add up to much for less frequently accessed data but become a much bigger expense as the scale grows

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The 2025 Gartner® Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) explores this shift and outlines what security leaders should consider as the market matures.

Primary cost drivers in enterprise cloud storage

When it comes to enterprise spending, these are the five biggest cost drivers for cloud storage:

Egress/data transfer fees
API request costs
Cross-region replication
Retention misalignment
Orphaned resources

The common denominator for all of these factors? Size. At a large scale, minor inefficiencies quickly become huge issues, and rounding errors accumulate into fortunes.

High-frequency operations like IoT data ingestion, logging, and frequent updates can create significant API request costs. Disaster recovery and compliance requirements for cross-region replication compound both storage and transfer expenses. Data often duplicates or remains in expensive tiers due to a lack of lifecycle policies or governance oversight, introducing a lot of waste and missed savings potential from storage pricing-tier discounts. With a vast range of infrastructure services in huge numbers, some naturally slip through the spreadsheets, becoming orphaned cost tickers.

Overlooking storage has immediate effects at enterprise scale. Ignoring architecture, cost-efficiency, and automation always results in badly executed enterprise storage—which ends in eye-popping bills.

Relationship Between Storage Cost and Security Posture

The relationship between cloud storage cost and cloud security posture is not an obvious one, but poor cloud security posture and data security hygiene can have direct cost consequences.

Cloud Costs Related to a Breach

Cloud security misconfigurations and vulnerabilities can give attackers an entry point to access your organization’s sensitive data. If an attacker exfiltrates data from your cloud storage, the data egress and transportation fees could show up on your cloud bill. Managing cloud security risk can also reduce financial risk, preventing cloud spend associated with a security incident.

Cloud Costs Related to Shadow Data

Shadow data can be a major source of both storage cost and security risk. Shadow data is defined as data that is either unmanaged (stored or moved outside governed IT and security postures) or inefficiently managed (data that’s excessive, unused, and unnecessary). Shadow data expands the attack surface and potential for a breach. Stale data, excessive object duplications, and inefficient retention policies are also taking up storage space that you’re paying for. Detecting shadow data is a feature of some modern cloud security and cost management platforms that can help reduce costs and improve security posture.

Compliance requirements affecting storage costs

Regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS mandate many specific data storage security controls, which might affect the total price of your storage. Your considerations will depend on the specific compliance framework you need to follow, but here are some cost drivers you should know about:

Immutable storage might be priced the same as standard storage, but additional API calls, versioning, and mandatory retention add to its cost.
Default encryption at rest, provided with provider-managed keys, comes at no cost but might not be enough for some regulatory compliance frameworks. Customer-managed keys are a better bet for compliance, but might incur per-request or per-key costs.
Data residency is another factor that might limit your savings options. It can be costly to store data in your local region or satisfy the additional security reinforcements required to store it elsewhere while remaining compliant.

Security and compliance matter!

Considering everything we’ve discussed, keep this principle in mind as we move on: True cost optimization must consider both direct storage costs and potential security or compliance related financial impact.

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Cloud storage cost optimization strategies

Apply data classification

Proper data classification enables risk-appropriate and compliant storage decisions. This means budgeting more security spending for high-value assets and applying storage policies that perfectly balance cost and protection requirements. Automated AI-driven data classification can help scale classification efforts across large environments and provides significant savings without sacrificing the safety of your storage.

Detect and remove shadow data

Implement a tool that can automatically detect unmanaged or improperly managed data. Look for stale data, excessive object duplications, over-provisioned object versions, and inefficient retention policies. Establish a process to review shadow data findings and eliminate non-essential data, reducing storage costs.

Implement cloud security posture management

Reduce financial risk by reducing cloud risk. Implement a cloud security posture management tool that can proactively identify security misconfigurations in the cloud, reducing the risk of a breach that could incur storage related costs.

Automate lifecycle and retention policies

Services like S3 Intelligent-Tiering and Azure Blob Storage lifecycle management policies can be used to automate storage class selection. This might optimize storage cost, but it also incurs costs for API calls (Azure) or the service itself (S3 Intelligent-Tiering).

To turn tiering into a discount advantage, choose wisely when you’re designing your architecture. For bigger workloads, automation definitely provides a return on investment: When the scale goes up, more opportunities for savings appear (but tracking every one of them manually is nearly impossible!).

Be smart about data transfer

Data leaving cloud provider networks incurs egress fees that can exceed storage costs for data-intensive workloads. To get the lowest cost, you need to be very smart about what leaves your cloud—or more precisely, when it leaves.

Cross-region and cross-cloud data movement tends to multiply transfer costs. Weigh your options carefully, and consider every architectural choice that forces you to put data in egress transit. When it comes to regional replication, think about why exactly you need to apply it, the scope of replication you need, and whether other means of accomplishing cross-regional availability (e.g., edge/CDN distribution) could solve your problem. Limiting the amount of replicated data will save a lot of money and time.

Across providers, effective costs depend on egress rates, destinations, and negotiated discounts; model both directions with calculators and contracts before designing cross‑cloud flows. Here, cost depends on the type of data, its weight in gigabytes per month, and the operations you have to execute on the receiving end. Review the terms and pricing models of both beforehand to make sure you’re getting the best deal.

Finally, analytics, backup, and multi-cloud architectures can drive a lot of unexpected egress charges. Consider them early in your infrastructure blueprint and combine other methods outlined here to keep surprises at a minimum.

Use the right tools

Unifying cost management, data security posture management, and cloud security posture management can be a powerful combination for fighting both security and financial risk. While cost management and security tools have traditionally existed in separate silos, modern cloud management platforms have emerged that unify security posture and cost visibility, enabling FinOps, cloud security, and cloud engineering teams to operate with shared context and priorities. When choosing a solution, prioritize platforms that…

Deliver detailed cloud graphs mapping the relationships between resources in your cloud environment, including storage resources
Connect agentlessly to all major cloud providers to collect cost, security, and cloud infrastructure context, while reducing the operational overhead of deploying agents
Let you leverage policy-as-code (PaC) frameworks to implement strong policies that reduce both security and financial risk
Automatically detect shadow data, enabling you to reduce the attack surface and optimize costs in tandem
Offer multi‑cloud normalization so storage resources, risks, and costs are consistently modeled across providers
Map both security risks and cloud costs to environments, specific application services, and service owners, empowering owners with complete visibility into both the financial and security profile of their services
Integrate with existing SIEM, ITSM, and FinOps tools; gaps in coverage, data silos, and restricted information flow can negatively impact your security posture, instead of improving it

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How Wiz reduces security and financial risk

Few platforms offer a unified view of cloud security risks, data security risks, and cloud cost, but removing silos between these areas can have powerful security and cost benefits. Enter Wiz.

Wiz provides enterprise-class security for your cloud storage. Here’s how:

Wiz offers unified CSPM, DSPM, and cloud cost management so teams can monitor storage class, egress, and request costs alongside cloud security and data security posture.
Wiz’s agentless approach provides comprehensive visibility into cloud storage costs and security risks without operational overhead.
Shadow data detection surfaces unmanaged or improperly managed data, enabling teams to eliminate unnecessary data or poorly managed retention policies to reduce cost
Graph‑based context for cost + risk through the Wiz Graph: Wiz correlates storage assets, identities, network exposure, and data sensitivity, and cost on a unified graph, enabling teams to visualize relationships between cost and risk re
Wiz’s shared dashboards and integrated workflows facilitate seamless, effective collaboration between FinOps team, security teams, and the cloud infrastructure owners who are responsible for implementing both cost optimization fixes and security remediations

Ready to optimize your cloud storage costs while strengthening your security posture? Get a personalized demo and see how Wiz's unified visibility helps you make smarter storage decisions that reduce both spending and risk.

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