What is the real value of my stored documents?
Today's guest blogger is Mark Lewis. Mark is the Senior Director of Marketing and Alliances for Riverbed in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) for Riverbed. He is based in London, England.
I was talking with a customer recently about his storage needs, how they had grown over the years
and how they were likely to grow in to the future. Truth is, he said, “It’s difficult to know what to keep and what to dispose of, so we keep everything, just in case”!
It reminded me of the ‘man drawer’ sketch by comedian Michael McIntyre. A ‘man drawer’ is the kind of place you store batteries, even old ones you haven’t had a chance to throw away yet. You’ll store instruction manuals for appliances you no longer own, new and old light bulbs, keys from homes you don’t live in any more and, of course the most masculine device key of all, the radiator bleeding key.
Why do we keep all this? I have asked this question of many customers and they all agree they know they are keeping more than they need to, but the reasons are very convincing. For some it’s regulatory needs, though they admit not all documents are regulated but it’s ‘too complicated to separate them’. For others the argument of falling disk prices means the cost of storing is always coming down, excluding management of storage of course.
But how are we going to protect all that data? Even with deduplication storage technologies, the rate of growth is going to continue at a tremendous rate and more importantly what happens at the point of recovery? There are going to be a lot of old batteries, bulbs and keys to sift through or rather their business document equivalents.
One assuring bit of news are the new services being launched by various organizations such as Amazon and AT&T with many more to follow, offering backup options in a multi-tenanted environment. Some call this ‘cloud storage’.
The great news is your back up really can be someone else’s problem and with technology from organizations like Riverbed with its Whitewater appliances these third party solutions can seamlessly integrate in to any IT environment. If you want to learn more look out for a number of online seminars and trade shows taking place. Or you can read more about these solutions here
Great analogy! The junk drawer dilemna typifies individual/corporate tendencies in regards to file storage.
Expanded storage and reliable backup are key. Way to connect the two! :-) Monica
Posted by: Monica Svenmarck | March 23, 2011 at 12:38 AM