Meet the Dirty Dozen Data Offenders: Why Storage Is Exploding in Every Industry

Kevin Thomas
11 minutes ago
13 min read

In today’s digital economy, data is your most valuable asset, but it’s also your biggest challenge. Every day, businesses generate petabytes of new data from video surveillance, AI training pipelines, geospatial imagery, healthcare imaging, financial transactions, and countless other sources. Managing, storing, and archiving this growing volume is no longer just an IT problem; it’s a business-critical strategy that impacts security, compliance, and cost.

At Geyser Data, we understand the balancing act companies face: keeping critical data accessible while reducing storage costs and eliminating hidden fees. That’s why we’ve created a Cold Data Cloud Storage Service: a smarter way to handle both short-term archives and long-term retention without the complexity, cost, or infrastructure headaches associated with traditional storage systems.

Welcome to our 12-section blog post exploring the top sources of enterprise data growth, why storage costs are skyrocketing, and how companies can get ahead of the curve with smarter data strategies. Each section dives deep into one category, highlights common challenges, and offers practical solutions for managing the tidal wave of information.

The Dirty Dozen List

Backup & Log Archiving — Why relentless logs and analytics fees are crushing budgets and what to do about it.
Video Surveillance & Security Footage — How high-res cameras are overwhelming storage and compliance teams.
Scientific Research & Simulations — Where petabytes are born and how labs can store smarter without losing critical data.
Geospatial Data — Satellites, drones, and mapping data are reshaping industries and storage strategies.
Healthcare Imaging & Medical Records — Managing mountains of MRIs, CT scans, and patient records securely and cost-effectively.
Media & Entertainment Production — From RAW footage to VFX, why creative studios need scalable data archives.
AI/ML Training Pipelines — The training datasets behind AI models are massive. Learn how to manage them without breaking budgets.
Legal Data — How law firms and corporate legal teams manage terabytes of e-discovery, case files, and compliance archives.
Social Media & Marketing Analytics — Why marketing campaigns create enormous spikes in data and how to manage them for long-term value.
Financial Trading & Market Data — Handling ultra-low-latency, high-volume data with strict retention and audit requirements.
IoT & Smart Infrastructure Sensors — Billions of devices are streaming data continuously. Learn strategies to store and analyze effectively.
Autonomous Vehicles & ADAS Testing — Self-driving cars generate petabytes daily. See how innovators keep up with the data flood.

Backup & Log Archiving Contribution to Data Growth

Log data is one of the most underestimated sources of explosive data growth. Server logs, API logs, application logs, and security logs are written every second across thousands of systems. Backup snapshots, audit trails, and system event files continue to accumulate.

At first glance, logs might not seem like big data. But take a look inside a Splunk or ElasticSearch environment, and you'll see the truth: logs are relentless. Every server ping, API call, authentication event, and transaction is being logged. Every second. Across thousands of endpoints.

The Problem: Logs Are Valuable, But Costly

Most companies don't want to delete their logs; they have to because the cost of hot storage is unsustainable. Enterprises often generate tens of terabytes of logs per day. In addition to raw storage size, analytics platforms like Splunk and Elastic often charge based on indexed data volume, which can be 2–5 times the raw log size. That means your 10 TB/day of raw logs could cost as much as 50 TB/day in analytics fees.

Additionally, the more logs are online, the slower the system becomes when running inquiries. Another reason companies delete logs is to improve log system performance.

As a result, many organizations settle for:

7-day or 14-day retention policies
Selective logging (which can miss critical info)
Or worst of all, no archiving at all

The Solution: Short-Term Cloud Archive

Short-term archive solutions offer a middle ground. You don't need to send everything to a deep, offline vault. Instead, you archive recent logs for 15–45 days in a cost-effective cloud tier that's built for this use case. When needed, logs can be restored for investigations, compliance checks, or replaying anomalies.

Key benefits:

Lower costs than hot storage
OpEx model with no hardware or infrastructure to maintain
Searchable, archive-aware formats
Extend retention without rewriting your SIEM budget

Real-World Example

Imagine a SaaS company using Splunk that archives only 7 days of logs due to cost constraints. By integrating a tape-as-a-service back-end for short-term log retention, they could retain 30 days of logs while significantly reducing their spend. If they needed a log from three weeks ago to catch a credential-stuffing attack, it would be instantly available.

Video Surveillance & Security Footage

Video surveillance systems have quietly become one of the most significant contributors to enterprise data growth. With the shift to HD and 4K video, every camera produces an enormous amount of data daily. Organizations across various sectors, including retail, healthcare, education, manufacturing, and government, now rely on video for security, liability protection, and compliance.

The challenge isn’t just capturing the video; it’s retaining it. In many industries, regulations require that footage be stored securely for weeks, months, or even years. But keeping that footage in expensive hot storage quickly becomes unsustainable.

The Problem: Retention vs. Cost

A single 4K security camera can produce up to 1TB of data per month. Multiply that by hundreds or thousands of cameras, and the numbers escalate fast. Storing this volume of inactive footage on high-performance disks or public cloud block storage comes at a steep price.

Additionally, many businesses keep redundant copies for legal protection, creating even more pressure on storage budgets.

The Solution: Cost-Effective Video Archiving

Instead of treating every video frame like mission-critical data, organizations can offload older footage into a short- or long-term archive. This allows companies to meet compliance requirements without paying premium prices for inactive data.

Key benefits:

Store high-resolution footage affordably
Maintain compliance with retention rules
Reduce infrastructure strain by freeing hot storage

Real-World Example

Imagine a university required to retain 90 days of surveillance footage for regulatory purposes. By moving older video files to a tape-as-a-service archive after the first 30 days, the university can cut costs dramatically, while ensuring the footage is available on demand if needed for investigations or legal cases.

Up next: Scientific Research & Simulations — where the datasets are so large that they make even 4K video look small.

Scientific Research & Simulations

Scientific research is driving some of the largest data growth in the world. From genome sequencing and climate modeling to particle physics and drug discovery, modern experiments and simulations are producing petabytes of data at unprecedented speeds. Universities, labs, and private institutions all face the same challenge: how to store, share, and protect massive datasets without overwhelming budgets or infrastructure.

The Problem: Multi-Petabyte Datasets

Research often requires storing data while keeping it accessible for peer review, collaboration, and regulatory compliance. Many organizations are now aligning with FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), which means they need cost-effective storage strategies that maintain accessibility and rich metadata.

The challenge is that keeping both active and completed datasets in high-performance systems is expensive. Researchers often end up making difficult choices: deleting valuable data, shortening experiment retention periods, or struggling to meet funder mandates because they lack affordable long-term storage.

The Solution: Cold Data Archives for Research

A hybrid approach provides the balance researchers need. High-performance storage can handle active experiments and simulations, while completed datasets move into cost-optimized cold storage tiers. These archives support metadata-rich indexing, enabling reproducibility and seamless sharing across institutions.

Key benefits:

Lower storage costs without losing accessibility
Maintain compliance with FAIR and regulatory standards
Archive multi-petabyte datasets securely and affordably
Enable frictionless cross-institutional collaboration

Real-World Example

Imagine a global health research lab sequencing 10,000 human genomes, each producing 150 GB of raw data. Storing everything on high-performance systems would cost millions annually. By archiving inactive datasets in a cold storage service, the lab maintains compliance, enables reproducibility, and shares data securely with collaborators — all while keeping costs under control.

Up next: Geospatial Data and the massive layered datasets generated by satellites, drones, and mapping sensors.

Geospatial Data

Geospatial data powers applications from climate modeling and disaster response to city planning and autonomous navigation. Generated by satellites, drones, IoT sensors, and mapping systems, these datasets are enormous, detailed, and often time-sensitive.

The Problem: Huge Datasets, Costly Retention

Governments, research institutions, and private companies need to keep years of historical geospatial data for compliance, trend analysis, and longitudinal studies. But multi-petabyte hot storage environments drive costs beyond control.

The Solution: Cold Data Storage for Layered Archives

Cold storage tiers allow organizations to keep recent datasets accessible while offloading historical imagery, satellite captures, and mapping layers into cost-effective archives.

Key Benefits:

Lower storage costs for high-resolution imagery
Flexible retention policies
Fast retrieval of historical data when needed

Example Scenario

A city planning department captures continuous drone imagery for infrastructure projects, generating hundreds of terabytes annually. By archiving older survey scans, they control costs without sacrificing access to critical data.

Geospatial imagery produces staggering storage needs, but healthcare faces an equally intense challenge. In the next section, we examine Healthcare Imaging & Medical Records and how cold storage helps balance cost, compliance, and patient care.

Healthcare Imaging & Medical Records

Healthcare organizations produce vast amounts of data from MRIs, CT scans, X-rays, ultrasounds, and digital medical records. These files are large, sensitive, and subject to strict regulatory requirements.

The Problem:Regulatory Compliance Meets Skyrocketing Costs

Healthcare providers must retain patient data for years or even decades under HIPAA and other regulations. Imaging archives can easily reach petabytes in size, making primary storage environments costly and difficult to manage.

Hospitals and clinics often face:

High costs for PACS and on-premises storage systems
Long retention windows required by law
Increasing complexity in protecting patient privacy
Difficulty scaling to meet exponential imaging growth

The Solution: Cold Data Storage for Compliance

Cold storage provides a cost-effective option for retaining regulated imaging data while keeping it secure and compliant. Active records stay in primary PACS environments, while inactive images are archived to low-cost, long-term tiers that remain accessible when needed.

Key Benefits:

Cost-effective retention for long-term compliance
HIPAA-aligned security controls
Scales easily with growing datasets
Preserves fast retrieval for audits or treatment

Example Scenario

A regional hospital network produces 20 TB of imaging data monthly but struggles to afford the retention requirements for 7 years. By archiving older scans to a cold storage tier, they reduce infrastructure costs while ensuring compliance and patient care quality.

Healthcare’s storage challenge is significant, but media production studios face a different type of struggle. We'll dive into Media & Entertainment Production and how cold storage enables creative freedom without breaking the budget.

Media & Entertainment Production

Media companies, streaming platforms, and creative studios generate enormous volumes of RAW footage, audio tracks, VFX renders, and digital assets. Each phase of production—from filming to editing to distribution—adds to the storage burden.

The Problem: High-Resolution Content and Legal Hold Requirements

Today’s media workflows involve 4K, 8K, and even 12K resolution. Just one feature film can consume hundreds of terabytes, and most studios are legally obligated to retain source footage and masters for future re-use, remastering, or litigation.

Studios face:

Massive RAW file sizes from multi-camera shoots
Expensive primary editing infrastructure
Prolonged legal retention timelines
Risk of data loss due to fragmented storage solutions

The Solution: Cold Archive for Completed Projects

Cold storage lets studios keep projects accessible while freeing up costly primary infrastructure for ongoing production work.

Key Benefits:

Cost-efficient storage for inactive creative assets
Maintains accessibility for future re-use
Scales to handle multi-petabyte libraries
Protects against accidental deletion or data loss

Example Scenario

Imagine a post-production studio working on five feature films, each generating 250 TB of RAW footage. By moving completed projects to cold storage, they reduce infrastructure strain while keeping assets safely accessible for re-releases or derivative content.

While Media teams handle massive amounts of content, AI companies are pushing storage limits even further. Let's explore AI/ML Training Pipelines and the unique challenges of managing machine learning datasets at scale.

AI/ML Training Pipelines

Artificial intelligence and machine learning projects depend on massive datasets that include images, videos, sensor readings, and labeled metadata. Training modern models involves constant dataset duplication, versioning, and experimentation, which compound storage demands exponentially.

The Problem: Data Gravity and Rising Infrastructure Costs

As models grow more sophisticated, training pipelines require tens or hundreds of terabytes per iteration. Datasets are often duplicated across environments to maintain reproducibility, further driving costs. Organizations also face new auditability and compliance requirements around training data provenance.

AI teams often struggle with:

Escalating GPU storage costs
Tracking and managing dataset versions
Retaining artifacts for compliance and explainability
Balancing performance needs with cost constraints

The Solution: Cold Archive for Training Artifacts

By archiving inactive dataset versions and intermediate artifacts, AI teams free up expensive GPU-optimized storage while preserving the ability to retrain, validate, or audit models on demand.

Key Benefits:

Reduces cloud costs for inactive data
Supports reproducibility and compliance requirements
Scales seamlessly with growing training workloads
Keeps critical data available without wasting GPU resources

Example Scenario

An AI company training autonomous vehicle models ingests 500 TB of sensor data per week. By moving completed datasets to a cold archive, they control infrastructure costs while maintaining accessibility for retraining and regulatory review.

AI datasets are growing faster than almost any other category, but legal teams face a different challenge: protecting sensitive information. Let's unpack Legal Data and the importance of secure, compliant storage for e-discovery and case management.

Legal Data

Law firms, corporate legal departments, and government agencies handle millions of case files, contracts, deposition transcripts, and discovery documents. E-discovery alone can involve processing and retaining massive datasets for extended periods.

The Problem: Chain of Custody Meets Exploding Volumes

Legal teams are under pressure to preserve metadata, document integrity, and chain of custody while navigating strict regulatory requirements and growing discovery workloads. Storing these large volumes on primary systems drives costs and operational risks.

Challenges include:

Growing size and scope of legal document repositories
Long retention timelines due to regulations and litigation
Metadata preservation for authenticity
Rising storage costs and security concerns

The Solution: Secure Cold Archive for Legal Workflows

Cold storage enables legal teams to retain inactive case files and completed discovery projects in secure, immutable environments while reducing infrastructure burden.

Key Benefits:

Low-cost retention for long-lived legal data
Preserves metadata integrity
Protects against accidental deletion or unauthorized access
Supports e-discovery timelines and audit requirements

Example Scenario

Imagine a law firm handling 500 active cases with over 2 PB of document repositories. By archiving closed matters to secure cold storage, they maintain compliance while freeing active infrastructure for ongoing litigation support.

From legal matters, we pivot to marketing, where campaigns create a hidden avalanche of content and performance data that needs cost-efficient storage.

Social Media & Marketing Analytics

Modern marketing campaigns produce massive amounts of engagement data, ad tracking logs, campaign assets, and audience insights. Every click, impression, and share contributes to a growing data footprint that becomes critical for trend analysis and ROI measurement.

The Problem: Short-Lived Campaigns, Long-Term Data

Marketing teams often focus on real-time results, but long-term analysis requires storing historical performance data and creative assets. Between social platforms, ad networks, and analytics tools, raw and indexed data can multiply quickly — becoming expensive to keep in hot storage.

Common challenges include:

Short-lived data spikes during campaigns
Retaining historical data for attribution and benchmarking
Managing images, videos, and mixed content formats
Rising cloud storage costs for inactive marketing data

The Solution: Archive Expired Campaigns

By archiving old marketing datasets and creative assets to cold storage, teams can preserve performance insights while optimizing infrastructure costs.

Key Benefits:

Low-cost retention for historical audience segments
Ensures access to prior campaign data for re-use
Stores high-resolution assets securely and affordably
Avoids overpaying for analytics on inactive datasets

Example Scenario

A retail brand launches a large-scale holiday campaign generating 15 TB of social engagement data and thousands of creative assets. After the campaign concludes, they archive the data to a cold storage tier, freeing up budget for future campaigns without sacrificing historical insights.

Let’s dive into Financial Trading & Market Data where milliseconds matter, and the cost of long-term retention can be staggering.

Financial Trading & Market Data

Financial institutions, trading platforms, and exchanges produce enormous volumes of tick data, trades, and market snapshots — often measured in millions of records per second. While real-time systems require ultra-low latency, regulatory compliance drives long-term storage needs.

The Problem: Compliance Meets Performance Demands

SEC, FINRA, and other regulations require multi-year retention of trading and audit data. Primary systems are optimized for real-time performance, not long-term archiving, creating an expensive challenge for financial firms.

Key challenges include:

High-speed capture of thousands of trades per second
Regulatory requirements to retain data for 5–7 years or more
Escalating storage costs for tick-level and historical market data
Maintaining audit-ready datasets without disrupting trading systems

The Solution: WORM-Capable Cold Storage

Cold storage enables institutions to archive massive volumes of tick and trade data while meeting write-once, read-many (WORM) compliance requirements.

Key Benefits:

Reduces primary infrastructure load
Ensures retention policies are met
Keeps historical datasets accessible for audits
Avoids cloud lock-in and unpredictable storage fees

Example Scenario

A trading firm processes 1 billion transactions daily and is required to retain 7 years of history. By moving inactive trade data into a WORM-compliant archive, they reduce costs while ensuring instant access when regulators request an audit.

While financial data pushes systems to their limits, the next frontier involves billions of devices.

Up next, we explore IoT & Smart Infrastructure Sensors and how connected devices are silently creating one of the fastest-growing data explosions today.

IoT & Smart Infrastructure Sensors

The Internet of Things connects smart homes, industrial systems, vehicles, and city infrastructure. Each sensor may only produce small amounts of data individually, but when aggregated across millions of endpoints, IoT datasets grow rapidly and require intelligent management strategies.

The Problem: Tiny Devices, Massive Data Volumes

IoT systems generate constant telemetry streams that must be ingested, processed, and analyzed in near real time. However, once the data ages, it loses immediate value yet remains useful for diagnostics, compliance, and predictive modeling.

IoT deployments struggle with:

High-frequency input from thousands or millions of endpoints
Rising cloud costs for inactive sensor logs
Regulatory retention needs in sectors like energy and healthcare
Balancing edge processing with centralized storage

The Solution: Archive Sensor Data Efficiently

Cold storage provides an affordable way to retain telemetry, diagnostic data, and historical event logs without overloading live systems.

Key Benefits:

Scales to handle billions of data points
Reduces infrastructure strain on IoT platforms
Keeps long-term logs available for analytics and machine learning
Supports hybrid workflows across edge, core, and cloud environments

Example Scenario

A smart city deployment collects 250 TB of IoT data monthly from streetlights, traffic systems, and energy meters. By archiving inactive logs to cold storage, they ensure access for compliance reviews and predictive analytics without exceeding budget.

While IoT is transforming entire cities, autonomous vehicles push the data challenge even further.

In the final section, we explore Autonomous Vehicles & ADAS Testing and why cold storage is critical for innovation and safety.

Autonomous Vehicles / ADAS Testing

Autonomous vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) rely on LiDAR, radar, GPS, video, and sensor fusion data captured in real time. A single test vehicle can generate multiple terabytes per day, making data management one of the industry’s toughest challenges.

The Problem: Extreme Data Growth Meets Safety Requirements

Companies must retain test data for retraining models, replaying edge cases, and meeting safety audits. However, storing this bulk data in active environments quickly overwhelms infrastructure and budgets.

Challenges include:

Terabytes per day per vehicle during testing
Datasets requiring precise labeling and metadata tracking
Long-term retention for safety validation and regulatory audits
Complex workflows across global R&D teams

The Solution: Cold Archive for Sensor Fusion Data

Cold storage provides a central repository for massive multi-modal datasets while maintaining accessibility for engineering teams.

Key Benefits:

Reduces infrastructure burden
Keeps training data available for future model iterations
Supports replay for anomaly detection and failure analysis
Maintains audit readiness for regulators and insurers

Example Scenario

An autonomous vehicle company operates a fleet of 250 test cars, each producing 5 TB daily. By archiving older sensor fusion data to cold storage, they preserve datasets for retraining and compliance without overspending on active infrastructure.

Final Thoughts

Data growth is accelerating faster than ever, and the cost of keeping everything in hot storage is unsustainable. Whether you're dealing with relentless logs, endless video streams, massive AI training datasets, or geospatial archives, every organization faces the same challenge: how to store more for less without losing access. That’s why we created Geyser Data’s Cold Data Storage — an intelligent archive tier designed to reduce costs, improve performance, and simplify data management without compromise.

If you're ready to gain control of your growing data footprint and start building a smarter storage strategy, Geyser Data can help.

Take the first step today — reach out to our team to discuss your needs and discover how Cold Data Storage can lower costs while keeping your data accessible when you need it most.