Random Acts Of Storage Is Your Business Guilty? |
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| By Sarah Malter |
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| How long could you manage without your business information
if you lost it from your office systems? If you’re thinking
that’s a “how long is a piece of string” type of question,
it’s probably because your instinctive response, as the
owner or director of a business, is “Not all information is
the same”. You will know that some of your historical
business records have to be retained for compliance reasons
and you may not look at them from one decade to the next,
whereas other information – client and prospect details,
cash flow forecasts, stock positions, for example – well,
your people need access to those all the time … or you
simply don’t have a business. Yet, while it’s “obvious” to business owners, when we talk to them, that they don’t need all their business information instantly to hand all day every day, that “obvious” truth doesn’t always translate into their data management and storage activities. It’s why we see so many businesses paying over the odds to back up huge volumes of data on a continuous basis, without prioritising it according to how they use it and how quickly they would need it back. It’s why we hear so many business owners saying data backup is the preserve of their IT manager and all they know is that their data is backed up daily, stored “somewhere” and (hopefully) someone in the office knows how to retrieve it if needed. And it’s why so many of our clients have recently started asking for our help to transform what we call “random acts of storage” into a coherent, customised data management and retrieval policy. Developing a data management strategy that works for your business starts with assessing and categorising the data you use and manage, identifying what you need for day-to-day operations and which files you can archive for longer or manage without for longer. Some people have a natural ‘belt-and-braces’ instinct and want a copy of everything retained off-site. When you examine the true business need, however, you may find that they don’t necessarily ever need to have it all back immediately should they lose access to it locally. On the other hand, we’ve come across people who are potentially TOO relaxed about the security of their business data. One client told us he wasn’t that bothered because he ‘assumed’ his accountant would store all their accounts and tax files, his solicitor ‘probably’ kept copies of contracts and legal papers and his suppliers ‘surely must have copies of orders from us’. Wonder if he ever checked with all those other companies – or indeed if they appreciate his reliance on their data storage policies? Such eternal optimism isn’t typical of most business owners – and we’d usually recommend a slightly more pragmatic and responsible approach when it comes to taking responsibility for your own business data… For the rest of the article click here |
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