Data Management: A Secret Key to Small Business Success
It's time to get organized! Get control of your data storage and take your business to the next level by setting up a server-based network to share and protect all your important files. Once upon a time your entire business may have fit on a single PC, but that surely isn't the case today. When your business is on a roll, you may find the amount of information you try to store grows amazingly quickly, especially if you're running database-intensive applications such as large spreadsheets, sales management software, or inventory controls.
In addition, chances are you've been collecting large media files. You have photographs, presentations, and maybe even podcasts to keep track of. Where are you going to put all those files? How fast will you able to access them? And how will you access them when you're out of the office?
As a small businessperson, you're well aware that your business revolves around these important files, but what you may not realize is that in order for your business to grow, those files--and all your essential data--need room to grow too! Last fall, Gartner Dataquest conducted a survey of small businesses worldwide that found that, when it comes to managing their data, 55 percent of respondents said their growing capacity demands was a problem. Gartner also asked how fast those businesses expected their capacity needs to grow in the next one to two years. The average response: 25 percent growth in one year.* The amazing thing is we believe those are actually conservative estimates.
What you need is a well-designed network and a plan for managing and storing your data making it easy to organize and access your critical information. Without such a plan, you may find yourself having to delete important files to make room for new ones.
In addition to managing and storing your data, don't forget about protecting your important files. Think about it: what would happen to your business if you suddenly lost all your files? Would your business even be able to survive? You can never forget that your information is one of your business's most valuable assets--you could even say your information is your business. Luckily, there are some easy steps you can you take to help keep your data secure.
1. Organize Your Data
Assess the following: What's stored on your computers today? Accounting files? Client contact lists? Marketing plans? E-mail archives? Where are all the most recent versions of those files, and who's in charge of them? Small businesses tend to suffer from a lack of control over their data, with multiple versions of files in multiple locations, all of which are taking up valuable storage space. Information is scattered all around the office, and who has the time to go digging for that one essential missing file?
You may have tried last-ditch, ad-hoc solutions to keep up with your information, such as adding external hard drives to your computers or creating archives on CDs to increase your storage space, but those kinds of clunky and inherently insecure strategies are ill-advised. They don't really solve any problems, and in fact, they can often create new ones.
Many small businesses try networking by setting up a humble peer-to-peer network solution in which every computer is connected to the next one down the line to make communication a bit easier. It may be a noble effort, but since there's no centralized storage space in a peer-to-peer network, that kind of setup doesn't address the painful issues of disorganization and redundancy.
2. Protect Your Data
As anyone who has ever suffered through a computer crash knows, every hour of downtime is costly, and if it turns out that you've lost valuable information permanently, the situation can go from annoying to disastrous very quickly. Just think about a hard drive crash on your most important PC or notebook. How fast could you recover? Could you recover at all?
Backing up the individual computers in your office one by one can be a big time waster and not necessarily a safe way to go about protecting your data. No paper-based backup system of printouts and file cabinets is perfectly safe from fire or natural disaster, and rudimentary hard drive-based backups can also be destroyed by human error, viruses, or hacking. Merely copying old files onto CDs is no solution either. One answer: don't just store your data safely at the office. Find an easy way to store copies off-site as well.
A Server Is the Solution
As a growing small business you need the ability to store and access all your information in one safe, central, and expandable repository. That's precisely what a network server is designed to provide, and no business is too small to consider a server solution for its networking needs. Stepping up to a server and building a well organized high-performance network is a first step toward kick-starting your business's growth and helping to enhance its productivity. Getting started is easier than you may think.
- Centralization: A server offers centralization: with file sharing, there's only one version of a critical file, it's always the current version, and it's always available to everyone who needs it, wherever they are. There's no more searching around the office. You can conquer the dreaded "data sprawl."
- Consolidation: Without redundant files floating around, there's more free space to accommodate the exponential growth of your data over time. When space eventually does become scarce, you can easily upgrade a server to add more users or more data storage as your business's growth demands.
With a central repository of files in place and online access activated, your team can access files on the server from home or while on the road, helping to improve everyone's productivity. And the server is your single point of access to the Internet. It's easy to protect from outside intrusion. - Easy Backup: A wealth of new, affordable, and near-automatic data backup technologies--to disk, to tape, and even to an off-site location--are available to help you address your data protection needs and prepare your business for any eventuality. Dell servers also support RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks), a technology that employs two or more drives working in combination, not only as a way to back each other up and introduce multiple levels of data protection and redundancy but also to speed up access to the data for everyone connected to the network.
- Control: With centralization and security for files and folders, data theft, data destruction, or unapproved access to your sensitive data can become easier to prevent. Pre-installed operating system software and wizards help make installation, setup, and maintenance of your network easy and can give your network administrators tight control over how files are accessed by each network user. You decide who can work on individual folders and files, and then you lock out everyone else.
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Position Your Small Business for Productivity and Growth
Take some time to assess your data storage, sharing, and backup needs so you can make the right decisions for today and the future so you can make smart choices about storage capacity, file sharing, data protection, and disaster recovery. Get all of these elements organized and working together, and you'll be equipped not only for the daily grind of your business but also for the surprises that pop up along the way.
