5 Tips for SMBs to Optimize Data Storage
Budget restrictions can leave your small to mid-size firms in a tight spot. But your data storage requirements are growing quickly and exponentially.
With storage, most companies are likely to tick even additional boxes because they associate storage capacity with growth capacity, without considering the complexity and long-term costs.
More so, they also dismiss the data retention regulations as most SMBs don’t have a comprehensive storage strategy.
However, if you’re looking to maximize your investments with data storage, we’ve tips for you to optimize your storage requirements.
1. Determine Your Expected Size of Data Set
The companies should start by assessing their expected size of the data set. This helps you in evaluating the storage requirements of your company. Begin by documenting the scope of your company and the number of employees. Here’re a few more things to establish before you buy any storage options:
- The size of the company’s data (in gigabytes or terabytes)
- Data access frequency
- Time to data requirements
- Long term retention requirements
- Data transportation requirements — from one location to another
2. Evaluate Who’s Managing the Infrastructure
The companies should determine how to manage their infrastructure and their comfort level when relying on an external resource. While bigger businesses can afford dedicated in-house IT staff, SMBs can use services of external consultants and value-added resellers (VARs) as their IT specialists.
Also, managed service providers (MSPs) can offer the latest insights on new technologies, manage vendor relationships and make recommendations on technology buying decisions. Today with extensive remote setup, MSPs can help you make quick adjustments and control your infrastructure directly.
3. Setting an Initial Budget Range
There are a plethora of storage choices to effectively and affordably deploy your data. But your choice may depend on your initial budget range. Using a multi-tiered storage approach helps a business to make cost/availability trade-off decisions.
At multiple points during the data lifecycle, you can make storage choices as per your requirements of the growing business and data infrastructure. This essentially means that your infrastructure is scalable and agile. Look for systems with increased capacity media cartridges or the easy addition of new appliances or arrays.
4. Define Your Active Archiving Requirements
The company policy/industry and government regulations usually define the data archiving requirements. Depending on the policies and rules, you’ll be able to state the retention and retrieval time requirements.
However, the amount of data your business assembles within a period relies on your industrial needs and demands of the company as well. Here, you also verify the “chain-of-custody” audit trail data.
Some technologies can help increase the effectiveness of active and multi-tiered archive you can incorporate into your infrastructures. This includes new storage media formats as well.
5. Cloud is a Great Option
There’s traction in the popularity of the cloud in the last few years. More SMBs are now turning to cloud storage for off-site, online backup. There threefold benefits to cloud storage:
- Cloud provides complete disaster recovery and business continuity solutions by adding critical off-site storage to ensure a business’s most valuable asset is accessible in the event of a disaster.
- The cloud offers pay-as-you-go options, which enable businesses to account for storage as an operational expense, not a capital expense.
- Cloud storage is infinitely scalable.
Also, adding a cloud element to your existing infrastructure is relatively simple, and it maximizes your security and accessibility options.
6. Use Tiered Storage
It can seem daunting to overhaul storage infrastructure with a tight budget. But implementing a tiered storage strategy is one of the best approaches for cost-effective optimization.
A tiered storage infrastructure uses higher-cost disk storage for business-critical data, lower disk storage for near-line access, and tape or cloud storage for low access. As you incorporate technology in your infrastructure — which is scalable, profitable, cloud seeding and secure — you present tangible business and cost advantages for your business.
At GRIP I.T., we understand the challenges of increased data flow and necessary management for data security and compliance. We offer you storage options that enhance your existing infrastructure, data security, and business growth potential. With us, get right-sized, flexible, and secure IT infrastructure in place. Spend your time to your business growth and leave your data growth to us. Get in touch for more details.