Data Storage

Data storage has been a problem for many businesses for years.

Consequently, this means, it will only get worse! Your business has spent years producing data and knowing what is current is very difficult. Data storage, like many other areas of your organisation, needs a strategy. Most of all, it requires an understanding of how to make sure the technology can support your business requirements. As more workers are demanding to work from home, how do you make this easy for them, and you? All remote workers, now have a mobile device of some sort and require data access. This means, your data storage strategy need to allow secure access to data from any location on any device

Shared data storage is where your business stores its data. Basically, it takes all your data from the hard drives in your PC’s and servers and puts it in one location. From here, you can then do a central backup and allow user access. If a file is changed, it is instantly accessible to everyone.

However, every day this data store becomes larger. This means a strategy has to be in place to manage this data store.  After all, there is no point in keeping old data on expensive storage. This should be archived off to cheaper storage, but still be accessible as required.

A data storage strategy, allows you to look at your data stores more carefully. Looking at what the business requires is key. If required, ensuring operational data such as database and financial information is placed on high-speed storage. Whilst old documents and the like are placed on cheaper and slower storage is part of the planning process.

Whilst your business must be mindful of its strategy, it must also consider matters of records retention and future obsolescence. There are undoubtedly many businesses storing data from old applications that no longer exist. Gaining access to that data may prove difficult in the future.

Technology does offer a solution. Cloud storage is becoming cheaper and more available. However, as previously mentioned, your data is your intellectual property. Do you really want to store that on a shared cloud server? A lot of the time you have no control over these servers, you don’t know how secure they are or who has access.

A good option is to create a hybrid solution. you still store your data on-site but send all backups to the cloud. This then starts to form part of your disaster recovery and business continuity solution.

Whichever solution you decide upon, and no one solution fits all business. Unleashed can help. We can tailor a solution to your needs, requirements and budget.