A cloud administrator needs to reduce storage costs. Which of the following would best help the administrator reach that goal?

Compression reduces the size of individual data blocks but does not eliminate duplicate data across the system, making it less effective than deduplication for environments with high data redundancy.

Deduplication identifies and removes duplicate data blocks across the storage pool, storing only unique blocks and replacing duplicates with pointers to the single stored copy. This can dramatically reduce storage consumption - especially in environments with many similar VMs or datasets - making it the most direct mechanism for reducing storage costs.

Using containers changes the application deployment model and does not directly reduce storage consumption for existing cloud-hosted data or VM disk images.

Rightsizing VMs optimizes CPU and memory allocation to reduce compute costs, not storage costs.