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We recommend the following:
Assess your capacity, performance and backup needs
Analyze the size and structure of your current IT infrastructure
Make a plan and report the results to your facility management
Request a network assessment from Loffler today to get started.
Cloud storage is purchased from a third-party cloud service provider, which owns, manages, and provides pay-per-use access to data storage resources over the Internet. Cloud storage providers are responsible for resource health, security and reliability, ensuring that data is available to customer applications around the world.
Applications access cloud storage through traditional storage protocols or directly through APIs. Many vendors offer additional services designed to protect, collect, analyze, and manage data at a huge scale.
Ensuring the reliable storage, security and availability of critical corporate data is of paramount importance. When considering cloud storage, there are several fundamental requirements.
Reliability. Data must be stored with redundancy. Ideally, they should be distributed across multiple sites and multiple devices within each site. Natural disasters, human error or mechanical failures should not result in data loss.
Availability. All data should be accessible when needed, but there is a difference between production data and archives. Ideal cloud storage offers the best balance between data retrieval time and cost.
Security. Ideally, all data should be encrypted - both when stored and when transferred. Permissions and access controls should work in the cloud just as they do in local data stores.
The storage conversation can be complex, and the hardest part is figuring out where to start. The key is to continually educate yourself and work with professionals who understand how to align available technology with business issues.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself when you're in the storage market:
1. What are your capacity needs?
You need to understand how much storage you are currently using and estimate how much you will need in the future so that you don't run into a shortage of space soon after you buy. You also need to consider your data efficiency needs to determine if it makes sense to use faster flash drives compared to traditional spinning drives. Compression and deduplication (deduplication) can provide significant savings if your data set supports them. Be sure to evaluate what data you have and whether compression and/or deduplication will provide significant storage savings.
2. What are your performance requirements?
You must consider how fast the performance needs to be so that end users can perform their work tasks efficiently.
Does your business use and rely on large databases? How many and what applications do you use? Using a service that contains a database component or other storage-dependent applications can be optimized if you purchase the right type of disk technology.
3. How will you handle backups?
Storing all your data on one external hard drive under your desk is unwise. A storm, fire or robbery could ruin your business. The standard recommendation is to have multiple copies of your data.
For example, a typical backup strategy includes:
snapshots running on your storage
local backups at the file and image level on a separate storage device
file and image-level backups performed outside of storage.
To support offsite backups, you need an Internet or WAN connection that will support backup traffic. As a rule, you should have sufficient bandwidth to perform a full backup of your data in 24 hours.
Also, having multiple copies of your data is very important if you need to restore your data at a particular point in time.
You will also want to name the ideal recovery points and recovery times for your business:
RPO (Recovery Point Objective) determines how far back you need to restore data. Do you need to recover data that is a week old or an hour old?
The RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is the time it takes to recover the information. You may be able to recover data from an hour ago, but if it takes two weeks, would that be acceptable? Probably not.
You can determine the ideal RPO and RTO for your company, but you need to know what the business owner or stakeholders are willing to put up with. The lack of owner/stakeholder involvement and documentation is the most overlooked part of a sufficient business recovery plan. If you have been attacked by ransomware and you have the necessary tools, you can get rid of the infected server and restore data from a backup within minutes. Again, the tighter the time frame, the more expensive the backup solutions become.
4. What does your current IT infrastructure look like?
How old are your current servers? If they're new, you may just need to upgrade the storage on your current nodes. If your servers are five years old, however, you may want to look at a simplified environment, such as hyperconverged, to upgrade your entire infrastructure.
How many IT people work at your company? Large companies often have IT teams with deep expertise in areas such as networks, storage, application development, servers, etc. But in small or medium-sized companies, IT resources can wear many hats with broad but more superficial knowledge. This is where a cloud or hyperconverged solution that combines servers, storage and networks in one space can be a good option. However, if your team already knows how to administer traditional three-tiered solutions, simplification may not be as important.
5. How will you sell storage upgrades internally?
Hyperconverged and/or cloud-based storage solutions may seem expensive at first glance, but they offer pay-as-you-go options that can save you money in the long run.
These simplified storage options also allow you to control more systems with fewer people. If you reduce your IT team from eight people to four, it's no longer that expensive. This concept makes many IT managers wary of simplification, but the potential resource savings can justify hyperconverged or cloud-based solutions for the business owner in terms of simple cost savings. It can also alleviate the constant "turnover" associated with hiring qualified (and highly paid) system administration professionals.
Technology is constantly changing, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution for every company. The leading storage brands of three years ago have changed significantly. And in another three years, today's hot logos may be overtaken by traditional logos or disappear altogether.
Keep an eye out for changes in the industry. Consulting with professionals who make it their business to know current trends can be helpful in the long run.
