Assessing Your Storage Needs
Your company's data storage capacity may be fine for now. But you'll soon need to bump it up, cautions Entrepreneur Magazine. One factor driving the storage squeeze is government regulation, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, which requires organizations to archive huge volumes of data that would otherwise be deleted. Other drivers pushing the need to grow:
- Unrelenting assaults from viruses, malware, ransomware and their ilk require more deliberate data back-up practices, which increases storage-capacity demands.
- An increasingly litigious business environment that forces organizations to save email messages for five years or more.
- Use of more resource-hungry applications and operating systems, as well as the proliferation of larger media files, such as video.
Entrepreneur recommends that businesses that aren't certain about their storage needs, or ready to upgrade current capacity or technologies, thoroughly assess their situation before reaching out to a Managed Services Provider. Get a good handle on the volume, location and types of data you're dealing with by asking questions such as:
- Which applications generate the largest number of files?
- Which applications run on which servers?
- What is the data's age, utility and business value?
- How quickly do you need to access data and from what local or remote locations?
Armed with such information, you can begin to think about which storage options and technologies best meet your current and future storage needs.