Storage tiering & lifecycle

Storage cost is mostly a function of how much data you keep and which tier it sits in. Data that is written once and rarely read still bills at hot-tier rates; snapshots and backups accumulate well past any retention policy; buckets and accounts have no lifecycle rule to age data down automatically.

What we look for

• Cold data on a hot tier — blobs/objects not read for a long window that belong in Cool/Cold/Archive (or Intelligent-Tiering / Autoclass).
• Over-retention — snapshots, point-in-time restore, long-term retention, soft-delete, or versioning kept far beyond the stated policy.
• Missing lifecycle — an account/bucket with no rule to tier or expire data, so it only ever grows.

Retention changes are checked against your data-retention and compliance policy first — we never recommend shortening a window that an audit requirement needs.

How to act

Tiering and lifecycle rules are reversible (re-tier the data, re-raise the window). Deleting snapshots/backups is one-way, so those candidates lead with a snapshot-or-export pre-step and a grace window. leancosts drafts the lifecycle rule or retention change and what to watch on the next bill. Follow Act on a cost finding.