10 Data Storage Considerations for Growing Companies

As the business world becomes more and more data-centric, what questions does your growing company need to ask about its data storage?

Recently, we began a series of posts on data strategy by asking whether your company data is an asset or a utility. In this post, we will look at 10 key data storage considerations that should be evaluated as part of your company data strategy.

What is Data Storage?

Data storage can be broadly defined as the collection and retention of information using digital technology.

Sometimes data storage refers to the physical hardware itself. Other times, it includes the processes connected with storing data. Both are important when considering data storage in the context of your company data strategy.

So, we can think about data storage in two categories. First, we will consider the storage infrastructure itself, including both the hardware and the data management systems. Second, we will touch on managing that platform – including backup, archiving, and retention policies.

Data Storage Platform

The data storage technology and vendor you choose will be a critical part of implementing your data strategy. Here are 7 important areas to evaluate.

1) Size and Growth

• How much data does your company currently store?
• How rapidly is new data generated?
• How fast and how large do you expect your data stores to grow?

Awareness of the current size and growth patterns of your company’s data ecosystem is crucial for accurate planning.

2) Data Storage Infrastructure

• What does your current IT infrastructure consist of?
• Have you recently made investments in updating hardware, or is company equipment nearing end-of-life?
• Do you have internal talent that is tasked with managing that infrastructure?

Any technology strategy must ask: What can and what should we manage internally? This question applies to data storage as much as to any other part of IT.

3) Data Types and Workflows

• Is your company primarily concerned with transactional data?
• Do you have large bodies of reporting data?
• What about unstructured data?
• Does company leadership have plans to expand the ways it uses or generates data in the future?

Different technologies support certain types of workflows better than others. So, knowing what your company wants to get out of its data both now and in the future will impact your data storage decisions.

4) Traffic

• How many data consumers do you expect to have and how will they access the data?
• How many concurrent users or connected devices do you anticipate?
• What types of data consumption are typical?

How and how much your data is consumed will also impact data storage requirements. Therefore, accurately projecting this usage can save countless headaches later on.

5) Data Storage: Cloud vs. On Prem

Evaluating whether to use a cloud-based or on premise data storage solution is critical to your data strategy. So, be sure to include all of these areas when performing your analysis:

• Security
• Budget/Cost
• Regulatory Compliance
• Location/Distribution

Do your homework. Prominent tech leaders have strong arguments on both sides of the cloud vs. on prem debate. So, what is right for your company may not be the same as what is right for your industry peer. Evaluate the options in the light of your company’s budget, needs, and current state to come to the best decision.

6) Data Storage Vendor

Choosing the vendor of your solution is your next big decision.  For a good article about questions to ask when evaluating vendors, see this article.

While we at The SERO Group specialize in SQL Server and Azure SQL, there are many vendors for data storage. Which vendor is right for your company? Budget, security, the requirements of the business, and the current state of your data environment will likely be your biggest considerations.

7) Licensing for Data Storage

Navigating licensing requirements can be a pain. However, carefully researching features that are unlocked with each licensing tier is important to getting the best service and support from your chosen data storage solution.

A careful cost-benefit analysis of licensing can be a game-changer for unlocking the highest potential of your data team as well. Sometimes advanced features are rightly deemed superfluous for your business case. However, at other times, higher licensing tiers afford security, recovery, performance, efficiency, or scalability options that are well worth the cost.

For SQL Server (whether on prem or on an Azure VM), this means considering Standard vs. Enterprise edition. Managed instances and Azure SQL databases have other important licensing considerations. See here for Microsoft’s description of the differences and here for a discussion of the differences between some of these options.

Management Considerations: Backups, Archiving, and Retention

8) Backups

• How are you currently backing up your data?
• Have you tested the recoverability of your backups?
• Would your backups still be available if a site-level disaster occurred?

Your backup strategy is critically important when thinking about data storage. Disasters and crisis events happen. In fact, we at The SERO Group have just about seen it all in terms of recovery efforts. Depending on your data storage platform, different backup considerations will apply to you.

There are usually three levels of backups that could be relevant to think about: local, image-level, and offsite. So, be thorough when creating your strategy. Remember – frequency and redundancy are keys to a strong backup strategy. Your future self will thank you if confronted with a crisis!

9) Data Archiving / Table-Level Snapshots

So, why archive or take table-level snapshots of data if you have a solid backup strategy in place?

While this may not always be necessary, taking a snapshot of point-in-time data can be helpful or necessary for important data that may fluctuate (financial data, for example). These snapshots can also act as a point of redundancy in your backup strategy for critical data.

However, archives can require a significant amount of storage. So, how and where to store large amounts of snapshot data should be evaluated if an archiving strategy is used.

10) Data Retention

• How much data do you need to keep and for how long?
• How long should your backups and archived data be in short-term storage?
• What about long-term storage?

You will need to consider any regulatory requirements that apply to your data when answering these questions, as well as the operational needs of the business.

Want to work with The SERO Group?

Data storage can be a challenge, especially for growing companies. How to store the data? When to archive it? Where to store it? Who is responsible for it? All can be be challenging questions.

Our clients depend on their data. They need to know that their data is protected, that it is reliable, and that they can leverage it to make more informed and better decisions.

If that’s something you’d like to learn more about, let’s have a conversation.