Four data storage methods and measures for SMEs

"Every company is a technology company." With the growth of big data, this statement has recently been left behind, but this is true. Companies of all sizes, from growing companies, government agencies, social enterprises and non-profit organizations, are facing the new reality of data compilation and data protection, and how to safely store them in a place that is inexpensive and complies with applicable laws. The problem. In the "World Backup Day" held on March 31 every year, this topic has become common and important. These choices are certainly overwhelming, but if the planning process takes into account certain factors, people’s efforts to securely store and manage data will not be ignored, such as understanding how best to layer the data and where it is “active”. Based on the storage of its location, how to effectively avoid data duplication and effectively compress data, thereby reducing storage capacity and costs, and how to combat the threat of ubiquitous ransomware. Taking some time now can save you a lot of trouble, including business suspension or complete failure.

The following are four methods and measures for SMBs to better implement data storage management.

(1) Take an active defense against ransomware

The enterprise's computing environment is critical to its business, including external systems. For example, consider an e-commerce system and an internal system, such as a customer's credit card information in a prospect database and an inventory system. Now, imagine how terrible it is that they can no longer access them. Do you think this is impossible? According to the statistics of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Cyber ​​Crime Department, U.S. companies have 4,000 times a day. And this figure has grown exponentially. In addition, cyber attacks have become increasingly aggressive and complex; if there are no rigorous measures to ensure that the backup data is isolated and inaccessible, these cyber attacks will be able to encrypt all data backups.

Ransomware is a particularly dangerous form of malicious software that is the company’s primary concern. Do not think that it will not happen because it did not launch an attack. Recently WikiLeaks shared thousands of documents from the CIA. These documents prove that companies of all sizes may be hacked.

In order to combat the spread of ransomware, small and medium-sized enterprises must remain vigilant and adopt strong recovery strategies and correct solutions to ensure that their businesses quickly return to normal after an attack. Fast recovery minimizes business loss, uptime and costs. The effective and preventive approach adopted includes matching existing network security solutions with storage systems so that SMB businesses can restore the state of a few seconds prior to the attack and remove corrupted data.

(2) Use storage tiering for better economy and storage

As the use of solid-state drives (SSDs) becomes more affordable, companies are measuring the performance and cost-effectiveness of mechanical hard disks (HDDs). However, no matter what its economic situation, it needs to be adopted. Regardless of its size, all workloads can be run on solid-state drives (SSDs). In order to achieve the proper balance, SMEs can consider adopting hybrid solutions for storage tiering. These solutions allow SMBs to optimize the availability of their data and the cost of data storage. "Hot data" (frequently accessed data) resides on solid state drives (SSDs) to ensure very fast access; less critical data resides on conventional mechanical hard disks (HDDs), which are less expensive. Tiering to the cloud is the next logical step in adopting a multi-tiered data storage strategy.

(3) Use hybrid IT and migrate to the cloud

Hybrid IT is where some IT resources are maintained in an internal data center, while other IT resources are migrated to cloud computing. This provides a good choice for IT managers who need fast access to data, but may prefer to pay more for their on-premises data centers. Less expenses. SMBs may find it the best of both worlds because it not only retains control of the data (when the company needs it, it is there), but it is more cost-effective than on-premises data center alternatives. Hybrid IT also allows IT departments to respond quickly to rapidly changing business needs.

In today's digital economy, SMBs obviously need to deploy data centers on-premise, a combination of public and private clouds to keep the market competitive. In fact, research firm IDG's recently released "Enterprise Cloud Computing Survey 2016" predicts that by 2018, traditional IT departments will have less than half of applications and platforms. SMEs can use hybrid IT to manage data in real time.

(4) Deduplication and compression can achieve better storage and economy

Today, the amount of stored data grows at a high exponential rate. With the increasing use of documents such as images and video, the number of stores over the past three years has exceeded the number from the beginning of human history to three years ago, and has not shown signs of slowing down. The number of redundant files is another reason for this puzzling statistics. Following the "less is more" principle, storage systems should provide online data deduplication and compression, which can reduce the need for four to five times the storage capacity to improve overall system performance.

As long as these four measures and methods are followed, SMEs can take a step forward in market competition and respond to external (and internal) threats. And it can also assure customers that they are operating according to today's reality and are ready for the future.