Big Data Drives Maturing Cloud Storage Market

Best Practices: Backing Up and Securing Data

Your cloud storage plan needs to be comprehensive. Don’t just back up your servers, back up your laptops and desktops. You never know what will be damaged. Back up at least once at day, preferably more. Make sure you have a least one copy

Automation is imperative. Manual intervention experience has proven back up is not reliable. Your storage system needs to be fully automated and monitored.

Time sensitivity: Remember how important your data is and determinehow much does that data change. Data always needs to be protected. Is it an hour old? 24 hours old? That’s going to determine how often it needs to be backed up.

Disaster recovery. How fast do you need that data back? A lot of people have a solid idea of how much they data they have but there is a time factor is associated. Most people don’t grasp it and they just come up with an arbitrary number.

Data security: What is the data actually comprised of? Companies know how much data they have, they know the business uses that information, but many CIOs can’tdetermine how the business uses the data it is storing. There is a big difference between documents the marketing team has to store (pictures and icons), versus HR and payroll and information where encryption is required. Type and context your data so you can apply the proper protection to prevent data theft.

Make sure the data is in a single unified capability. Multiple copies of data in multiple places – paying for it to be stored multiple times with no benefit of it having it in so many places just drives up the cost of storing it. There needs to be a value to it. Understand the difference between highly available data versus multiple copies of data that doesn’t change a lot that are accessible by one source.

Work with the right vendor. Partner with a service provider who can help you navigate the different storage options. Today, there is not a great deal of standardization and portability across providers. Ensure that your applications are portable. A good partner can help you achieve that.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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