The key to effective storage management: How to identify errors and resolve them before they affect your business

In today’s data-driven business environment, it is vital that your storage management solution is securely protected and always delivering crucial insights for your company when needed the most. With data being an extremely valuable asset to any organisation, it’s imperative that your ever-growing quantity of data remains accessible, manageable and protected at all times to optimise your business’ performance and success.

Effective storage management involves a lot of trust. Users trust that their data will be safeguarded; they will be able to access and retrieve their data reliably in acceptable periods of time in the same state and condition as it was when they last stored it. Infrastructure managers trust that the storage management products and devices they purchase will perform reliably and responsively and vendors trust that their clients will operate and maintain them properly.

In order to effectively manage the process of data storage in your organisation, you need to fully understand the significance of the four major pillars of storage management: capacity, performance, reliability and recoverability. This will allow you to identify areas for improvement and quickly resolve any potential issues, before they even affect your company.

Storage management capacity

Storage management capacity requires the provision of sufficient data storage to authorised users at a reasonable cost. When it comes to optimising the efficient use of data storage, most efforts are centred around large-capacity storage solutions when larger capacity can result in poorly used or wasted space. To increase the utilisation of large-capacity storage devices you can put a robust capacity planning process in place across all of IT to match storage resources with forecast demand and to monitor disk space usage.

Storage management performance

Even though data is a vital element that underpins all business functions, management often lack visibility over the organisation’s data protection status and the critical areas of vulnerability. Understanding your environment and how it’s performing has never been so important to ensure access to your data and avoid predictable disruptions.

Adopting a versatile robust and efficient platform, combining storage management and security management solutions, will allow IT specialists to gain comprehensive visibility of their network and can collate all threat information. This information can include insight and alerting of potential issues and failures that could cause service disruption or vulnerability, detection of malware, behavioural analysis and anomaly detection across all network traffic, or alerting on out-of-policy behaviour and traffic.

Storage management reliability

There is often a lack of confidence by management in the reliability of their backup solutions. Modern enterprise environments require a mix of multiple data protection and storage management solutions using an array of vendor technologies to meet business requirements. This not only causes high operational and administrative costs, but it can often leave your organisation vulnerable to compliance mandates and auditing checks.

By improving the reliability of your backup solution, the overall productivity of your organisation will benefit; providing management with the confidence they continually seek. Organisations require a consolidated approach for efficient systems management, reporting and monitoring of data and storage management.

Storage management recoverability

Recoverability plays a fundamental role in disaster recovery. When there is data that has been altered, deleted, damaged, or otherwise made inaccessible, there is a need for effective methods for recovering that data. Because of the criticality of the data, your organisation needs to prioritise having a reliable backup infrastructure to avoid your business facing a loss of data, system, application or location, that can then have a hugely negative impact on your business performance or reputation.

How you can use BAAS for effective storage management

Companies now require a package of data protection and storage management solutions that deliver secure data optimisation and protective backup strategies, such as Celerity’s Data Custodian Backup as-a-Service (BaaS) solution.

The BaaS integration (powered by IBM Spectrum Protect) will allow your business to use a single consistent fully integrated user platform for effective storage management, managed by Celerity’s dedicated team. This will allow you to reduce resource required for specialist technical training and expertise in your company and enables you to free up precious IT internal resources, that you can redirect where they are needed the most.

Having one integrated user platform will help save time and money, but it can help avoid unnecessary errors caused by differences in product interfaces and complexity of the backup infrastructure. This will also lead to optimised storage management performance and enhanced recoverability, minimising the risk and cost of unplanned downtime.

Data Custodian BaaS also gives you full flexibility, allowing your company data to be securely and automatically backed up on-premise or to a public or private cloud.

This solution also offers advanced analysis and reporting functions that will give you full visibility of your data storage environment. Increased efficiency will also help your organisation identify unnecessary data to free up valuable storage space.

If you’d like to learn more about Custodian BaaS and how it can help reduce your backup costs by 54%, check out our latest infographic.