Data Loss – An Ongoing Concern For Businesses
Long gone are the days of over-stacked filing cabinets and physical libraries stuffed with reams and reams of paperwork. These days, all of a company’s data is stored on pieces of computerized hardware either somewhere in the depths of the office building, or otherwise in large data centers as provided by cloud services.
All in all this is a much better system. Files can be searched for extremely easily by logging on to the appropriate database, and then retrieved with a simple click of a button. With so much data now flying around the web waves all over the world, the act of physical archiving is simply no longer viable, not to mention cost effective or productive.
However, storing data on computers, hard drives and servers is not completely risk-free. In fact, IT comes with its own very unique set of problems that administrators of yesteryear could not have possibly conceived of. Indeed, computerized data storage is more of a concern for the IT team than anybody else.
Your business will rely heavily on computers. And therefore you will naturally be concerned about data loss. Whether it’s down to hardware failure, theft, human error, a computer virus or cyber attack, data loss is serious business, and can be extremely costly for the unprepared.
DeepSpar cites that “hard drive failure is the most common cause of data loss” and in fact accounts for as much as 38% of these scenarios. The result of such a failure can prove to be detrimental to your business. Client information, credIT card details, financial reports or even whole systems can be lost, and once it’s gone, retrieving IT can make or break your business.
Data Centralization To The Rescue!
As with almost every problem that one is likely to encounter throughout one’s life, prevention is invariably better than cure.
Modern day businesses have to manage a high volume of scattered data around the web, which is constructed using many different formats by many different people. IDC puts the issue like this:
“Too much digital information creates the problem of organizing IT in a way that makes IT useful. Many businesses have more digital data than they can intelligently work with and often can’t extract what they need when they need IT or create business intelligence from it.
Indeed, lack of organization not only causes a problem of utilizing the data, but IT also creates a labyrinth in which said data is likely to get lost.
Enforcing a centralized data management system is key to combatting this issue. When data is stored securely with documentation, access authorization can be administered so that IT cannot be accessed without the necessary privileges through a tightly controlled process.
Furthermore, centralized data repositories can be backed up on a regular basis, meaning that in the event of a disaster, recovery is a quick and painless one-time job.
As data volume continues to increase exponentially, the need for centralized storage will become ever more prevalent, and businesses will do well to prepare for this and start taking action now.
