Today's businesses generate more data than ever before. Luckily, storage technology is correspondingly cheaper and more plentiful than ever before. This means your small business has work to do if you want to build an effective storage and backup strategy.
As traditional storage environments hinder application performance and increase latency, enterprises are turning to flash storage to improve performance and implement virtual desktop infrastructure. More widespread use of flash storage, though, may require vendors to be flexible with their pricing.
The minimum "best practice" backup arrangement for your vital data is to maintain three copies of the data: the original, a local backup, and a second backup offsite. With LaCie's CloudBox NAS device, you simply back up to the ethernet-connected unit, which then automatically backs up to LaCie's own online backup service. But easy as it is, CloudBox is also expensive, capacity-challenged, and slower than average.
Your PC's hard drive may have half a terabyte of data on its platters, and you might not remember the last time you backed any of it up. In all likelihood, though, you use only a few gigabytes' worth of files on a regular basis. With a combination of cloud-storage services, you can keep that data backed up and synced among all of your computers automatically, and access your most essential files whenever you want.
No question, the iPad and iPhone are amazing devices. But the iOS operating system isn't perfect. For example: How come AT&T rebills customers every month for cellular data service without asking? Do you really have to buy a AirPrint-compatible printer to print via your iPad? Can you get a refund from Apple on an iTunes purchase?
Take some time in the early days of 2014 to improve the computer setup in your home office or small business. These security, networking, storage and productivity tips will help you work faster once you get back to business as usual.
Network-attached storage (NAS) can make your business easier to run and more efficient in multiple ways.