Every company needs a storage management plan. As your business grows, you add new customers, keep the old ones, roll out new applications, and expand your network. As a result, the need for a storage management plan becomes essential. Adding new storage isn’t simple. You have to integrate new data and new applications with the old ones, and merging data isn’t always practical. The best move is to plan ahead, starting with a data center and cloud services for your storage needs.
Consider outside storage vendors and data centers that stay current with the latest technologies. They should also know how to ask the right planning questions. Cloud services can scale to meet your company’s storage needs.
Storage management considerations
A thorough storage management plan has many essential components. Here are the key factors to weigh, grouped by what they affect most.
Plan for risk, security, and compliance
- Disaster recovery. Storage management matters most when catastrophe strikes. Store the data and applications essential to your operations. Doing so lets you access them fast after an internal failure or security breach. Prioritize storage based on your company’s needs. Then order it by which applications matter most, so your IT system gets running again fast.
- Security. Identify which data you can’t risk losing to a breach. Review and prioritize all forms of intellectual property. Also encrypt your most sensitive data.
- Compliance issues. Consider what government regulations, if any, govern your data. You can’t share some data, such as electronic health care records, so keep it secure.
- Know who has access. Understand who has the authority to access your data. This matters especially during a crisis.
Know your data and its sources
- Business considerations. When companies merge, the data from each business has to mix with the new business or office. Companies with multiple offices also face different storage considerations than those with just one location.
- Know your data sources. Not every piece of data comes from a database. Some comes from email servers, network servers, or other places instead.
- Differentiate types of data. Customer data differs from vendor data, and both differ from employee data.
- Know how long to keep it. Decide how long you need to keep each type of data. Some records may need to stay on file for decades.
- Understand how your business uses IT. Today, employees work through mobile devices, office and home desktops, virtual platforms, and other IT systems.
Choose the right storage approach
- Compatibility issues. Review the type of data too, so you can load and reuse whatever you retrieve.
- Storage devices. Weigh the various storage solutions available, including hard disk drives, solid-state devices, and cloud storage. If you use multiple systems, make sure they mesh properly.
- Storage techniques. Storage techniques vary widely. Some take up far less space and cost less than others.
- Know the costs. Different storage solutions carry different upfront costs, and they also carry different installation, maintenance, and support costs.
- Avoid duplicate data. Data storage costs money, so review your data regularly to keep duplicates from driving up costs.
- Test the storage. Run tests to see how well the storage system performs before disaster strikes.
Get help now for your storage management needs
The right plan and the wrong one aren’t just different in cost. The right plan prepares you for growth, new industry demands, and disaster events. The wrong plan can mean lost customers, stolen data, or worse: a company that stops functioning altogether. To build the right plan and fully address your company’s storage needs, please call Volico at 305 735 8098. Our knowledgeable storage team is ready to help.
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