When it comes on data storage, there is no solution that can be considered as “one-size-fits-all”. Prior making a decision how and where you will store your structured as well as unstructured data, you first need to analyze the amount and type of data you have with the motivation for storing the information. Having strong background will help you determining the right route, whether to make a move towards cloud or to build on-premise solutions or simply the combination of two. The question here is how you weigh a sound data storage management strategy. Below mentioned are some suggestions that can help you towards a right selection and you will also get to know better ways of protecting and retrieving the sensitive data:

• Knowing Your Data: It is very significant to understand the data’s business value for defining a sound strategy of storage. For the evaluation of your data storage management policy, raise the following questions:
  • How soon will I get the data back once lost?
  • How readily I need to access data?
  • How much time is required to retain data?
  • What are the security functions?
  • What are the regulatory compliances?
• Don’t Avoid Data in Unstructured Format: Imagine s situation where you might want to unite the structured data of your transactional systems with unstructured or semi-structured data of e-mail servers, what would be the data modeling effort? Make sure that the policy that you have chosen allows you to combine all sorts of data without much hassles of modeling.
• Have a disaster recovery plan and constantly test the same to ensure data safety.
• Evaluate Your Compliance Needs: Whenever you choose a storage policy, make sure that your service provider contains all the credentials required for providing a completely secure and compliant environment as failure in total compliance operations may result into severe costs later.
• Make a Data Retention Policy: Establishing the data retention policies appears to be a necessity for both legal compliance and internal data governance as there might be some lots of data need to be retained for years to come, while some data is needed for few days or so. Hence, identify the most critical data of the organization and prioritize the management resources accordingly while setting-up the processes.
• Make sure you have set the priorities so that the data management resources can be directed towards the core business activities.
• Look for a Solution That Exactly Fits Your Data Needs: Many businesses these days have a flexible workforce, it is quite essential that the storage and data management solution you choose should be compatible with mobile as well as virtual platforms, apart from desktops and laptops and offer a continued experience over any platform, including intuitive experience in mobile devices and mobile editing capabilities.
• Don’t Allow Overhead Costs To Be Your Decision Dictator: Operational costs can make a lot of difference in the storage acquired. It will be best to consider the long-term implications of the storage characteristics and buying the storage that comes with best total cost of ownership over time reduces the chances of cost exceeding.
• Employ a Tiered Storage Approach: You can save money by using fast storage and less expensive platforms for the archival or data back-up. And, make sure that your systems can use different tiers of storage so that there will not be redirection required in case the performance needs of the application change.
• Know Your Clouds: All clouds that provide storage infrastructure as a service do not possess same features. Some of them are optimized for handling archiving; others are for performance and stability to perform as back support for primary data storage system. The bottom line is that the lowest price cloud may end up being the most expensive for long term if data is inaccessible or lost.
• Avoid Redundancy: Don’t waste memory by storing redundant data. This can also affect the database performance.
• Enhanced Security: Security has to be the first priority when it comes on managing data within an IT environment. It is imperative that data comprises two-fold security, virtually as well as physically. It is recommended to create an encrypted backup and house the same under a secure location so that the data and the entire organizational system can be recreated at the time of disaster occurrence.