Dell Small Business 360 - Technology Advice - Data Backup & Storage

Smart Storage Options for Growing Companies

Centralizing your storage sounds like it should be on Captain Kirk’s to-do list, not something for a CEO steering a much smaller enterprise. But actually, putting all your company’s data into one location is an easy process, and one that positively affects the bottom line.

De-centralization is an inevitable byproduct of growth. Starting with the CEO’s desktop, the first few sales reps are added, along with a marketing pro and an accountant. Each gets their own computer, and each starts building a silo of critical company data. There’s the occasional annoyance of having to email files to one another, which can create a version control problem, and when someone’s sick, access to certain information is restricted until they give up the password or come back in to work. Security and backups are a growing concern, but the team takes some comfort in the fact that if one computer fails, the rest of the data is safe, or if a hacker breaks in to one PC, he can’t see the information on the others. Of course this security comes with a wink and a nod: when that lone unit fails, the data will likely be gone forever. And everyone knows that security by roulette wheel – waiting for a hacker to read “just” one system’s files – isn’t sustainable or acceptable for the company or its customers.

The decision to centralize often comes when the frustration boils over; a critical file is needed, but can’t be accessed, an employee quits and his or her customer list leaves with her notebook, or a hard drive dies and the data is mourned rather than resurrected. Whatever the situation, it’s a turning point that either spurs the purchase of a server or a call to the local IT vendor to start pressing the existing server’s most powerful buttons.

Growing companies approach storage the same way their printers do toner: they use fantastic amounts and always ask for more. As the emails and PowerPoint® files pile up, those seemingly huge 20-gigabyte hard drives start to look tiny. Centralization won’t limit the amount of information your company produces, but it can store what you make more efficiently, and at a lower cost.

Let’s say you email a 10-megabyte PowerPoint file to five employees. Two respond with edits. With no centralization, the total memory cost of that process would be 80 megabytes (your original version, five copies sent to teammates, plus two new ones). With centralization – and a process called Single Instance Storage – the server’s software recognizes that six of the files are identical, and will delete all but one. The total cost: 30 megabytes. Repeat this process with thousands of files over several years, and the costs savings become very clear.

When you do have to purchase more memory, having a central location makes it easier to install in your network. Instead of adding external hard drives to each individual PC, you simply add a box that holds several hard drives to your server. Some of these boxes hold up to 15 drives, and you only need to purchase them one at a time as your needs grow.

When it comes to security benefits, storage centralization is a two-edged sword. It’s true that putting all your eggs in one basket (i.e. all your data in one box) can increase security risks. But consider this: are you ready, willing and able to protect each “basket” holding your company’s data? If your company has five PC’s, that means installing and maintaining five separate firewalls, anti-virus programs, and intrusion detection tools, and additionally requires that someone back up each one individually. Centralization means installing and maintaining just one set of these programs. Faced with this choice, most small businesses decide that they can achieve a higher level of overall security with one set of very high, strong walls, rather than five sets of kind of high, sometimes strong walls around five such baskets.

Internal security levels can also be established and managed easier. From the server, certain kinds of data or specific files can be blocked from specific employees. Access logs can also be read to see who has been reading or changing what files, should the need for a review come up. Finally, if employees leave the company, centralization means their data stays with the team.

Sure centralization can save money, but can it also build the top line? Yes, by helping employees access data faster. Many servers use something called “RAID” (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) to speed their systems and provide a backup in case of hard drive failure. This is a combination of hardware and/or software that saves two or more copies of all the company’s files across multiple hard drives (Drive A, B C, D, E, etc.) in a single server. Let’s say that two employees are accessing the server at the same time. Employee number one is trying to open a Word document, while employee number two is trying to save an Excel file. A hard drive can only read (i.e. “open”) or write (i.e. “save”) files one at a time; they can’t perform both actions simultaneously. But with RAID, the server can open the file for employee number one from “Drive A,” while writing the file for employee number two onto “Drive B.” The result? Faster file access for everyone.

Speed can also be boosted with “Network Attached Storage,” a fancy term for a server that’s designed to do a certain task, like file sharing. The hardware and software of this server are tweaked to provide maximum speed for calling up files or sharing them with teammates. These devices keep pace with employees who run at top speed, and reduce morale-busting frustrations with an otherwise sluggish IT infrastructure.

Hard drives are the hardest working parts of any computer or server. Constantly in use and consisting of many moving parts, they’re prone to breaking down over time. With the perspective that a failure is a matter of “when,” and not “if,” what can storage centralization do to make the problems easier to solve? First, backing up one set of files from the server is a lot easier than doing it on for three, five, ten or as many computers as the company is running. RAID can also come to the rescue. With multiple copies of the company’s files saved over several hard drives, the failure of one of those drives means zero loss of data. Lastly, consolidating data on a server means you have more robust options for backing up and creating an offsite copy of your data, including removable disk, tape and even other hard drives that can be stored on a different device in another location.

To be sure, there are drawbacks to storage centralization. The first is the upfront cost of the server. There’s also maintenance of the server but, compared to the cost of managing the same data in many different locations, it can be worth the investment. If you put all your data in one basket, but fail to protect it, properly manage access and back it up, you’re inviting major problems. The good news is that these risks almost never outweigh the rewards of centralization. The decision to centralize data is one that’s been made by millions of companies over the last 10 years, and one that’s undoubtedly led to faster, more secure, enterprises.