Data Management

As every business grows so does its data and we don’t give too much thought into data management. Not every business has a professional IT team and not everyone knows the in & out of computer data. However, with a basic understanding and some insight you can help improve any future business growth.

With data requiring physical storage space, no matter how little, it comes down to a cost for a business. Yes, even though an 80GB hard drive isn’t expensive these days for a business there are bigger costs involved.

Managing the data employees created

Business computers can become really clogged down with unnecessary data, even more if a business doesn’t have any policies and procedures. As we know the internet has an endless supply of entertainment. Its becomes easy for computer users to download MP3’s, videos, images, games etc but unknowingly to most, this is a major drain on business & IT resources.

Just some quick pointers when thinking about employee data would be:

  • Requires more physical space
  • Very time consuming for the computer administrator
  • More non business related data to deal with
  • Difficult to manage for migrations, backups & restores
  • Higher risk of computer viruses striking the business
  • Copyright infringement from downloading music, videos and even images

You’ll find that a lot of the larger companies disallow downloading of any personal data not only for IT reasons but also for financial reasons – data costs money but can also be extremely harmful when not handled correctly.

Managing Critical Business Data

Every business that has a computer needs to think ahead when it comes to creating files. It’s common that people just save files into separate folders on the desktop or newly created folders. This makes the data more difficult to track and more prone to business disaster.

To better manage business data its always good practice to have files stored centrally on a file server. For better navigation the file server should have a categorised directory structure which in turn helps with the organising of data. Access restrictions to specific directories can be enabled to keep certain data confidential from other users connecting to the server, think business protection.

When a business uses an application such as Oracle, MYSQL, MS Exchange or a type of CRM they are essentially creating critical business data. Its most likely this data is customer information, sales orders, sales leads, business accounts etc. Application data management is important when it comes to protecting a business but usually requires a lot more attention than your typical spreadsheet or word document. A well drawn up plan for installing and implementing business applications will greatly effect the management of data so consider

  • Using a server specifically for applications
  • Control where the applications saves their data
  • Create backups of any created data from the applications
  • Remotely host the server in a secure data centre
  • Protect the server by using a locked down firewall
  • Restrict access to the server
  • Make sure to have SLA’s in place with any service providers

Even though these are just very small factors that should be considered in managing data they are essential for today’s business. And even though we briefly touched on data costing money, these precautions are the essentials to safe guarding a business. Planning ahead will save a lot of headaches, time and money in the future.

Protecting Your Business data

Once you can get a good grip on what is the critical data for your business and how its stored thinking about keeping it safe is a step towards better business continuity. As part of a disaster recovery plan it should also be part of keeping customers information confidential – data leaks of customer information is a common occurrence, a disastrous one at that. Encrypting data has become a popular way of safe guarding any business data and with a vast range of software tools it has become an easy enough task.

Keeping data at one geographic location runs the risk of a disaster successfully destroying a business. Good remote backup solutions can help replicate critical data to another location such as a secure data centre. This not only helps with safe guarding data, it also helps protect the business.