There are several types of storage that you can use for your business’ growing data. And knowing what type of storage strategy is great for your business will help you save money and make management very simple. As more and more organizations realize that they need to store increasing volumes of data, they would need to know the different types of storage and what would be best for their businesses.
Unfortunately, there is no concrete formula in determining whether you should invest in offline or online storage. You must know your business and what your needs are.
These are questions you need to ask yourself:
- How valuable is data to your business?
- How often will you need to access your data? Is it daily? Is it regularly though not frequently?
- Or is it data that you need to keep but think you will not access?
Knowing the answers to these questions, you can find out what types of storage would be good for you.
Online storage: Ready access to your data anytime, anywhere
Online storage gives you ready access to your information and data. Some IT experts would argue that you can put your data on your hard disk or use Redundant Array of Independent Disks or RAID to give your data instant accessibility. This might work, but it will be very costly. Imagine having to store an ever growing volume of data on your own machines. Not only would you need to have a lot of hard disk space, and IT personnel to manage all that data, but you also run a higher risk of compromising your data and even losing it.
However, there is also a problem when you put your data online. Yes, it is accessible, but the more data you put online, the more you would tax your bandwidth and network. You will experience a slow-down of your machines and network, and that will lead to lost productivity.
Offline storage: For your seldom-used data
Putting all your data online would be a heavy burden to your bandwidth and network. So for data that you do not access regularly, you might want to consider offline storage. Offline storage makes use of CDs, DVDs, hard drives, USB sticks, tapes and other storage media. You put seldom-used data on these optical disks and just ask your IT administrator to connect them to the network when you need to access the data. Either that or you could use data management software to keep these optical disks continuously connected to your network without taxing your bandwidth too much.
This would free up your bandwidth and it would also mean that you will not need to buy a lot of hard disks for your data.
Offline storage is also perfect if you have regulatory requirements or if you would need to supply information for legal reasons. For information to be legally admissible, it should be stored on a write-once media. You cannot put it on RAID disks and other online storage.
If you need help sorting out your data storage requirements, contact Four Cornerstone. We have Oracle consulting services that can help you know for sure which types of storage would be right for your business and the data that you store. We could also help you come up with solutions that would make data storage and management easier for you.
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