Explanation
Why the waste happens and who it affects.
This can lead to growing costs from unneeded or rarely accessed data that could be expired or transitioned to lower-cost tiers like Infrequent Access or Archive Storage.
Billing model
The pricing dimensions that drive this cost.
Charged based on object storage tier and total GB stored per month.
How to detect
4 checks to find it in your estate.
- Review buckets lacking lifecycle policies or where all objects remain in standard tier
- Analyze object creation timestamps and last access data (if available)
- Identify buckets used for logs, backups, or system exports where retention can be limited
- Check with teams to validate retention requirements for each bucket
How to fix
4 ways to remove the waste.
- Create lifecycle rules to transition older objects to Infrequent Access or Archive Storage
- Enable Auto-Tiering on Standard buckets so objects larger than 1 MiB that are rarely accessed move to Infrequent Access automatically
- Set expiration policies for data older than required retention thresholds
- Standardize lifecycle policies across log or backup buckets
Documentation
Vendor references for pricing and configuration.