Advances in data storage and technology make it practical and economical to store quantities of data that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. For example, when USAA began scanning documents and mail back in the 1980s, it was considered to be a major technological breakthrough in storage cost. Today, a consortium of banks has formed a check-imaging archive to store large numbers of documents efficiently, hence further slashing storage costs and crossing another threshold in this rapidly developing area.

This reduction in storage cost is further made possible by the emergence of new systems such as autonomic computing. An autonomic system is an entire system - devices, networks, file systems, data objects, and software - that manages itself and achieves business objectives. Such a system uses detailed knowledge of its components, current status, ultimate capacity, the extent of its 'owned' resources, those it can borrow or lend, those that can be shared or should be isolated to govern itself.

The storage cost of this highly efficient system is 20–80 per cent of typical total server purchase cost, where storage personnel cost has historically been approximately three times the purchase cost of storage. The autonomic manager can perform tasks today done by an administrator in storage management to achieve overall objectives. This includes reports on availability and performance, moving data for performance, provision capacity, backups and restoration and commissioning new hardware, thus improving availability and response time and data integrity.