The amount of data analytics companies that businesses and enterprises store is growing at a rapid rate. In a new report from Symantec the total size that businesses store comes in around 2.2 zettabytes and when it comes to enterprises they have an average of 100,000 terabytes.
These numbers are unbelievably large now, yet they’re still predicted to grow another 67 per cent over the next year when it comes to enterprises. For small and mid-sized businesses who store an average of 563 terabytes expect growth of 178 per cent.
But why is this important? Well, on average it’s said that 49 per cent of an organisation’s value is represented by this information. The information your business generates can not only help you better serve your customers but it can also help you increase productivity. But, if your information isn’t properly protected then it can become more of a liability than anything else, so much so that it can mean the difference between success and failure.
So, what exactly is stopping companies from securing this invaluable information? Well, that same report from Symantec has reported that 69 per cent of organisations have lost information purely because of human error, hardware or software failure, or lost and stolen mobile devices.
With that in mind, here are five ways to help you efficiently manage your data to ultimately ensure that you’re getting the most out of your data.
It’s all about the information
When it comes to building and storing information, you need to focus on the infrastructure that will optimise the ability of your company to access, find and then consume the necessary information. Any technologies you use will have to support the specific information that you need; key ones to bear in mind include virtualisation, cloud computing, mobile devices and applications.
Make sure you understand
You need to know your information inside and out and know which is more valuable than others and why. So many businesses fall short because they lack basic knowledge such as who owns specific information, how important data is and whether it’s valuable in a personal or business nature, once you have this understanding you can then map it out, classifying it to discover its true value, then you’ll be able to appropriately prioritise security, protection and management resources for the information that matters most to your business.
Be as efficient as possible
You won’t need to store all of the data that you acquire, so try to be as efficient as possible by using deduplication and archiving technologies so you can protect more whilst ultimately storing less. Alongside this be sure to take advantage of both off-site and onsite shredding services that will deal with your physical information.
Outline consistent policies
This is absolutely essential. Consistent policies need to be set for information that can be enforced wherever the information resides; it doesn’t matter if this is in a physical, virtual or cloud format.
Be flexible
It’s important to be as agile as possible, no one knows what the future holds, so try and plan for future information needs as much as possible by implementing an infrastructure that will be able to support a continuous rate of growth.
