Storage and Backup Strategy for Your Small Business

Businesses feed on data and even generate data on a large scale. If you are business

leader, you must be aware that data storage is a big concern for any right thinking

business owner. For businesses to succeed, data storage needs to be taken care of

because that is the biggest weapon in your arsenal when competing with the others in

the market. Even if you are running a small business, you work with a lot of data that

would help you edge past the others. Terabytes of data are generated by a business

(big or small) and they are stored on storage drives that range from your laptop hard

drive to the big cloud storage, which has recently come into vogue. However, storage

costs have never come so low as it is today. You have options galore when it comes to

choosing the best storage for your business.

There are many small businesses that still struggle when they have to come up with a

storage and backup strategy. Reasons can be many (and some strange ones too) but

primarily surveys point to the confusion that exist about the different types of storage

options along with lack of knowledge about the advantages of modern storage options

and backup processes.

If you are looking at different storage options and consulted vendor representatives who

promised you to provide the best backup storage hardware for your business then it is

better to stop and start evaluating every option. Backup constitutes much more than the

basic hardware as the preferences and needs will vary from one business to another.

You have to understand that your data storage needs are different from the other

companies and you need to devise your own strategy.

In this article, we are not going to give you a strategy and instead try to look at some of

the latest options that you can evaluate and strategize based on the features offered by

each.

Data storage solutions – 6 viable and popular options:

1. DAS or Direct Attached Storage:

DAS includes all the storage devices, which are directly connected to your server or

personal computer by using the USB 2.0 or 3.0 ports. This is one from the old school

where you have to copy all the data from your computer or laptop and carry out batch

backups, which unfortunately contains many outdated data.

2. NAS or Network Attached Storage:

The NAS connect storage to a network and it includes a file server with attendant

feature and even accepts multiple drives. The RAID capability of this storage server

allows the NAS to avoid data redundancy and supports various protocols that are

directly linked to the laptops and PCs.

3. Storage with disaster protection:

This is available both with NAS and DAS and has protection features that save it from

common disasters that would otherwise destroy the unprotected data.

4. Online storage:

Small businesses have the option of storing all their data and files on a secured cloud

storage. Here the data and files are stored on cloud storage platforms that are really

easy to use and provide the right kind of storage at very low price. You do not need to

pay up any upfront fee to start using cloud or online storage and all your data and files

are stored in an incremental order.

5. Private Cloud:

If you do not want to rely upon the 3rd party cloud vendor companies for storing your

sensitive business data then you will have to get your private cloud data storage. This is

expensive compared to the other storage options.

6. Offline media:

This is the traditional tape storage device in the form of DVDs and Blue-Ray discs that

can provide data backup during critical outages. This is cheaper but not very efficient

option of data storage. Recovering data is difficult, and would need manual indexing.

About Technology Convergence Group

Technology Convergence Group (TCG) is a provider of business telecommunication

solutions in the Dayton, Columbus, and Cincinnati, Ohio areas. TCG is a Toshiba

Platinum Dealer, which is the highest attainable certification level. TCG supports all

Toshiba telephone systems from the IPedge VoIP system all the way to Strata

communication systems. At TCG, technicians are Toshiba certified and have an

average of over 20 years of experience.