How can you store data for your small business without breaking the bank?

If you do not have a lot of data to store, this is one solution. But if you end up needing large storage, like what a historical network system would hold, this will not be a viable solution.

There is more to the cloud storage solution than just where the data is physically stored. The remote network becomes an integral part of your storage solution. Yes, relatively fast internet connectivity is widely available today, but does your connectivity have the capacity AND reliability to support access to your critical business data?

If your company is small and doesn't have a lot of complexity to it, a local NAS can work. I would suggest something approaching Enterprise in quality and not your basic $500 system. While the cheaper solution can work, you give up a lot in features as well as support and reliability. Make sure that your network can handle any bandwidth that you will need to assign to this storage. Make sure that it is securely locked away and only IT personnel have access to it. If you do not have a quality IT professional to secure and segment the data this can be trickier.

Hybrid storage is something that is most likely going to be something for a larger company. Most likely 100+ people, or a company that plans to be that big soon. This will need to have an IT person for management as making sure that both your local and cloud storage are provisioned properly and secured properly is a very important thing. Making sure that encryption is enabled is tremendously important. Also you want to keep low bandwidth data on the cloud as you may get charged for transferring data as well as the storage itself.

JPG and MP3/MP4 are file formats with built in compression of some level and are used for specific applications and will not cover the vast majority of data that is stored. I do not feel that they are relevant in most situations. I do not recommend ZIPing your data to compress it. There are other better methods of compression although they usually cost money. First Windows has a built in data compression algorithm, however at least in the past it has been finicky and I would not recommend it, Linux probably has one as well and it falls into the same boat. If you are using local storage, I would recommend a NAS solution that is capable of Compression offload or even de-duplication. This will remove performance bottlenecks from your storage.

This is one where it should always be enabled. If your solution doesn't currently support it, you need to find a better solution. There are a couple of different kinds of encryption and that can be confusing. First there is encrypting the data while it is in storage (data at rest). This is usually done via some form of Full Drive Encryption standard and they are not all the same. I strongly recommend SED disks that support the Opal standard for this. Then there is encryption of the data moving from the storage to your computer (in flight), this is handled via SSL, TLS etc. I highly recommend this when possible although this will push you to a higher price point. If you are using Cloud, then this is an absolute MUST.