system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why does corporate technology seem to cost way more than the consumer equivalent?

I work in financial services for a large firm.  We work with a lot of data and it's only growing.  I requested to have a 1 TB hard drive added to our secure server.  

I was quoted a price tag of $23,000 from technology services to do so.  

You can buy a 1 TB hdd from newegg for less than $100.  I get that there's other costs involved such as mounting it, securing it, formatting it, etc.  But is that kind of price discrepancy normal in corporate land?

This is one extreme example (perhaps), but there are other examples I've come across over the years.  Does anyone else experience this frustration?
gpt
If you kept your data on a single $75 SATA drive, don't be surprised if it just disappears one day due to a crash.

Enterprise level storage arrays are much more expensive.  That $23,000 is likely for solid state storage (aka flash) and not SATA.  It's in an array that is fault tolerant and probably has software to create things like snapshots, clones, and backups, and it generally needs to fit the needs of the rest of your company's data.  Having a special solution just for you that doesn't fit other applications' requirements is a nightmare to maintain if everyone does that.

If you look up storage arrays that are just disk and don't have all those bells and whistles (in the IT world, we call that JBOD - jaybod, or Just a Bunch Of Disk), and you will be paying much much less per TB. You could probably get well over 200 TB for that $23,000 price tag.  It will have fault tolerance, but probably no way to do snaps, clones, or replication.