An organized office with papers carefully filed into the correct cabinets has been long accepted as a key to success – but many organizations have neglected to transpose these lessons to their online environments as well. Let’s take a brief look at optimizing data storage:
The difference between data as a burden and data as an asset often comes down to how it’s stored, structured, and managed. The mere act of preserving your data does not make it useful to you – it might instead give your organization a headache in terms of increased storage volume and rising costs!
Key issues in data storage
The main problems organizations are likely to encounter are:
- Data becoming split over unrelated storage systems, different formats, or different access methods. This alone can make information hard to track and cross reference – information that should be cross-referenced or related remains siloed by department instead, making it hard to draw the connection.
- Degraded performance, on both the technical and personnel sides of the house. For the human element, the act of working with saved data becomes more difficult as they have to hunt for relevant information, extending the time for workflows. On the technical side, overstuffed systems can see degraded hardware performance.
- Unnecessary cost spikes. The causes here can be varied, but generally include overflow costs on standard storage plans (especially if using the Cloud), opportunity costs due to longer workflows, or inefficient cost structure (for example, paying for high-performance access to rarely accessed data).
How can we optimize data storage?
Ensure you have a strategy!
Don’t work with your storage structures reactively! Plan out what you are likely to need in the future and ensure your steps align with this.
Tier data by importance
Data which is frequently accessed requires different handling than data which is rarely used. Creating a data categorizing approach lets you differentiate by how important it is, how likely it is to be accessed, and therefore what conditions the storage needs to meet.
Archive data for long-term storage
Effective data storage optimization includes archiving information that retains potential value but doesn’t require frequent access. This archiving strategy must balance compliance requirements, potential future analytical needs, storage costs across different media, and retrieval time expectations.
Your Data In Your Hands – With TECH-ARROW
