Regardless of whether you run a small business or an enterprise-level company, making sure that your data management and storage strategies are well optimized in terms of both data flows and costs is a must. With the modern business environment getting more and more complex, and costly, it is crucial to make sure that your organization is not overpaying for these processes and services.
Data Management and Storage involve a process that makes sure your data is properly collected, classified, processed, stored, and archived. For these purposes, businesses must make sure they use optimal storage tiers for their data sets, and that they have the right infrastructure for their data management processes.
But achieving the right balance between cost reduction and a highly operable data management plan is not easy. Typically, it can be achieved by reducing redundancy and eliminating poor resource utilization, while at the same time retaining optimal data accessibility and keeping both employees and users happy in terms of data request responses.
In order to achieve proper cost optimization levels for your company’s data management and storage processes, we recommend that you check the following best practice tips.
Classify and Protect Your Data
Due to increasing levels of digitalization, modern organizations tend to access and process huge amounts of data. Most of them deploy CRM and ERP systems for gathering consumer-based data, while they also need to ensure proper levels of regulatory compliance, especially if they need to follow regulations such as GDPR or HIPAA.
But in order to stay compliant with all these laws, protect their data and be able to use proper management systems, companies need to classify their data and have a strong and clear overview of their data structures. This is best done by defining and dividing data into different data sets.
Think about what data sets need to be confidential, think about reference- and meta-data, what information belongs to you and which belongs to your users, which documents need archiving software, data archiving and/or retention, accessibility levels, etc – and make sure that you find optimal solutions for managing, backing and storing these data tiers.
Consider Using “Converged” (Centralized) Data Storage
Rather than scattering data across multiple networks and channels, it is a good idea to consider having a Converged Infrastructure. The CI is great for bringing your data sets closer together and making sure that organizations are capable of managing their entire storage from a single, centralized point.
This can lower your data management and storage costs in the long run as you can use a single platform for storage management. The pitfall here for many businesses is vendor lock-in in terms of equipment and technologies used, which can, for some, increase their capital expenditure (or CAPEX).
Implement the Right SRM Tools
Using proper SRM or storage resource management tools can be of great assistance when managing highly complex storage ecosystems as these platforms take care of duplicate data, and all other redundant or obsolete copies of your documentation and files.
This is an important aspect of decreasing storage costs and minimizing storage space waste. Also, be mindful of secondary storage requirements and pay attention to backups, data mining, and have an effective disaster recovery plan in place.
This way, you’ll be able to optimize storage costs, as well as improve the quality of your data management strategy.
Synchronize Security and Data Storage
Data management, data storage, and data protection are all critical parts of the same environment. Creating multiple data backups is always recommended, and – if possible – be sure to have both on-site and off-site data backup locations. Multiple backups enable you to quickly locate and recover your data if a cyberattack takes place.
To fully prevent your organization from facing critical data disasters, companies must develop a reliable and effective recovery plan, as well as make sure that their data security and data storage operations are properly in sync. This process includes careful planning, the deployment of the right tools, as well as having all the necessary policies in place, some of which may include data privacy policies, code of conduct, email retention policies, encryption policies, password policies, data processing policies, etc.
Learn about the best practices for email archiving, which is an essential component of synchronizing security and data storage, enabling organizations to optimize their email management processes.
Backing Data up
It is a good practice to integrate the backup solution your organization is using with the converged storage solution. But this practice does come with one caveat – using this strategy is likely to make your storage ecosystem more complex than some admins would prefer. The remedy for this could be using software-defined methods for disaster recovery and backup as these platforms support the converged approach.
Software-defined tools enable businesses to quickly and cost-efficiently back their data up as they make sure that a single tool can be used for managing storage pools, while they also assist in post-data-breach data recovering processes. For these solutions, however, the cost reduction component kicks in if a business decides to go with a bundled solution from a single vendor.
Finishing Up
Data security, management, and storage are among the critical aspects of running a successful business, and generally shouldn’t be the areas where your business is cutting costs. However, there are always methods one can follow to achieve just that. But these methods need to be well throughout and executed, because your business may suffer great losses in resources should a data breach take place and compromise the safety of your and your consumers’ data.
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