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Seven Best Practices for Managing Data Storage

By Alice LaPlante

Despite the strategic value of data, many enterprises have yet to establish robust storage management strategies that keep important data readily available, the cost of managing it low and its access safe and secure. Given the huge proportion of corporate data that resides in unstructured or semi-structured
form -- such as in documents, spreadsheets and e-mails -- this is a daunting challenge.

"Data both grows very fast and ages very fast," says Mike Noordyke, president of the Trivalent Group, a consulting firm based in Grand Rapids, Mich. "You need to put strategies in place that allow you to monitor and manage it effectively, or it will impact your firm's ability to function properly."

Data storage experts recommend the following seven practices to help enterprises, both large and small, stay on top of their data storage challenges:

Establish recovery time objectives and put technology and processes in place to enforce them Recovery time objectives (aka RTOs) specify the maximum time allowed between a system crash and when data is restored. "Backup is one thing, but restoring is another," says Noordyke. "You can have the best backup mechanism in the world in place, but if you can't make your data accessible again in a timely manner, your business can take a real hit."

Classify data into "tiers" By assigning value to data throughout its lifecycle, from  the moment it is created until it is destroyed, organizations can begin to establish policies on when to move data from the most accessible -- and expensive -- disk storage to media that is more difficult to access, but which is (article continues)

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