Delivering Efficiency with Managed IT, Part III
It’s true that managed IT services do a lot to make technology accessible to small and medium-sized organizations that wouldn’t typically look immediately to technology to fix parts of their business. One of the innovations that modern business has made is in prioritizing a smarter approach. Apart from data storage and database management, modern businesses are using the data their marketing, sales, fulfillment/distribution, and support departments take in to see exactly how their business is actually functioning, and make sound business decisions as a result. Today, we’ll take a look at how a managed IT service provider can help a business with its data management.
Data Management?
Data management is the actual handling of the data flow in and out of your business. Your business can have all the high-end hardware in the world, but if you aren’t doing enough to manage your data, you run the risk of security failures, inefficiency, and cost overruns. Here are some ways that a managed IT service provider can help you manage your organization’s data.
Cloud Services
At the top of the list comes cloud services. Cloud computing has all types of options for about any process you can think of. Do you need storage? Processing? Artificial Intelligence? You can get any computing you can imagine in the cloud. The cloud platform is unlike any other in that, as long as you manage it properly, you only pay for the computing that your organization needs. It also comes with accessibility options. If you need anywhere, anytime access to data, the cloud is the best place to look.
Security
When considering your organization’s data management, security has to be a major point of emphasis. While having complete control over the hardware that’s hosted on site is nice, the cost of the hardware and maintenance can be prohibitive. Today, there are cloud based security options that function to secure cloud-based information systems in ways commensurate with industry best practices.
Backup and Disaster Recovery
Another big part of protecting your business’ data is having the right amount of redundancy, and the ability to restore that redundant data to the information systems you depend on. Cloud platforms typically come with built-in redundancy, but if you choose to control your business’ own hardware, you will need a system in place that allows for comprehensive data backup and recovery. Two questions you should ask prospective providers are in regards to recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). That is, how often is your data backed up, and how quickly can it be recovered?
As a part of a managed IT service contract, providers tend to believe that while onsite data backup works better for situations where data needs to be restored faster, cloud-based redundancy protects the data in the case it’s the brick and mortar location that is affected by disaster. A network attached BDR device that pushes versions of data to the cloud is the optimal way to backup any organization’s data.
Data Warehousing
As mentioned above, businesses are using data in exciting ways. From software integration to fuel efficient business, to business intelligence and analysis platforms, structuring data in a way that works best for the software that needs it has become a priority. Data warehousing is the process of combining data from different aspects of your business into a singular structured platform to help business’ decision-making abilities.
If you’d like to learn more about efficient data management and data security, give the Ashton Technology Solutions team a call at 216 397-4080.
